Sheriff Glen Gleason’s life has gone horribly wrong. Now, on the edge of a complete breakdown, he’s suddenly pulled back from the brink of the abyss to solve a horrible multiple murder — an entire family slaughtered by a fiend who has disappeared without a trace. Fighting his way past interference from inept state and federal cops, aided by Kat van Kirk and his other deputies, and by Carol Fraser, a troubled profiler sent down by the state capitol, Glen Gleason finds himself in a personal battle of wills with a trained assassin who vows to keep killing until Glen brings him down. The frozen landscape of an unforgiving Iowa winter is the gameboard where the dead stack up like bloody pawns, and Glen battles a black knight to the death.