Former CIA agent Ward Hopkins is shaken by a dreadful piece of news: his mother and father die in a car crash. He has almost come to terms with fate’s blow when he suddenly discovers a stash with a note in his father’s chair: “We didn’t die.” Then a mysterious video comes into his hands. That’s when he first hears the phrase about “straw people.” Meanwhile, in different places around the country, fourteen-year-old girls begin to disappear. The abductions have one thing in common: every time the captor leaves the parents a sweater belonging to the missing daughter, embroidered with her name. Instead of threads, the captor uses the victim’s hair. And again, connected to each of the crimes, this strange phrase surfaces: “straw people.”