While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers gets a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a murder at a nearby resort, where a woman has been shot while kayaking. The more he digs, the more he discovers the arrows of suspicion that point in many directions--then he finds that this is not the first murder, that there was a second, seemingly unrelated...

Detective Jonathan Stride's first wife, Cindy, died of cancer eight years ago, but her ghost hangs over Stride's relationship with current lover, and fellow detective, Serena Dial.

"Jonathan Stride's best friend, Steve Garske, makes a deathbed confession: he protected Stride by covering up a murder. The police dig up Steve's yard and find a body with a bullet hole in its skull. With suspicion in the murder pointing at him, Stride finds himself off the case and on leave from the Duluth Police. His only ally in clearing his name is his wife, Serena."--Publisher.

When a freak accident kills a driver on the remote roads outside Duluth, Jonathan Stride is disturbed to discover that the victim appears to be a ghost, with a false identity and no evidence to suggest who he really was. What's worse, the man has a gun locked in the trunk, and it has recently been fired. It's up to Stride to solve the mystery, but there are those who would stop at nothing to stop him.

"Attorney Gavin Webster says he paid $100,000 in ransom money to the men who kidnapped his wife. Now they've disappeared with the cash, and she's still missing. Gavin claims to be desperate to find her--but Stride discovers that the lawyer had plenty of motive to be the mastermind behind the crime. Even as Stride digs for the truth about Gavin Webster and his wife, he must also deal with a crisis in his own marriage. But all he can do is keep moving...