After her husband's death, single mother Meredith just wants to raise her son in peace—until handsome young co-worker Christian catches her eye. Dazzled by Christian's hypnotic seduction, Meredith goes home with him against her better judgment, to his apartment in the dark underbelly of Detroit. Big mistake. For Christian's easy smile hides deadly secrets, and he wants more than a one-night stand. He wants to keep Meredith forever.

Ever since a drunken one-night stand gone wrong, single mother Meredith Banks can't seem to shake Christian Morgan, the hypnotically attractive and dangerously obsessive intern from her office. It started with the late night phone calls, the hang-ups, the unwanted visits to her row home in Detroit. Now her son Troy, all that matters in her world, has gone missing after school. Meredith knows Christian is behind her son's disappearance, but the cops won't help without evidence. To find her son and his psychopathic kidnapper, Meredith sets out alone into Christian's deadly world: the criminal underbelly of Detroit, a surreal nightmare of depravity, desperation, and murder. The further she steps outside the law, the less hope she has of turning back. Failure now would cost Meredith her son—but finding him may cost her soul.

Wanted by police after her vigilante crusade through Detroit, Meredith Banks flees the city to continue tracking her son’s kidnapper, the dangerously charming psychopath named Christian Morgan. As her detective work ties Christian to a series of missing college girls, Meredith realizes she’s only scratched the surface of the horror that lurks behind his beautiful smile. Now afraid that she’s up against a serial killer, Meredith needs help. She finds it in Glen Marsden: a surly, sarcastic student whose fiancée was among the missing college girls. Together, they set out toward what they hope is Christian’s home: the desert ghost town of Shadebrook, Nevada. But Shadebrook has secrets of its own, from the seedy brothel on the outskirts, to the abandoned orphanage known as Children’s Home 5, rumored to be the site of abuse, murder, and human trafficking. As Meredith and Glen search the town to unravel Christian’s terrifying past, they’re drawn into conflict with powerful criminal forces who will do anything to keep the town’s secrets buried—and silence anyone who asks the wrong questions.

Kidnapped, beaten half-dead and delusional with fever, Meredith Banks awakes as a captive in a hellish compound somewhere in the desolate backcountry of the American southwest. Ever since she set off in pursuit of her son’s kidnapper, the obsessive psychopath Christian Morgan, Meredith’s ordinary life as a working single mom has been swallowed whole by an endless, surreal nightmare. Turns out, finding her son was the easy part. It’s getting him to safety that’s the trouble. Now, her only hope of surviving and escaping with her son is biding her time and trying to integrate into Christian’s cult of brainwashed, kidnapped girls—but for that, she has to resist the brainwashing herself, and that’s no easy task. For Christian is impossibly beautiful, charming as the Devil, and twice as cunning. Meredith’s greatest trial yet may be resisting the compulsion of her abductor’s hypnotic smile. Her son, her sanity, and her soul depend on it.