Award-winning journalist Caitlin Bergman's mother is dead-at least that's what she's told everyone for the past forty years. It's easier to lie than to explain how Maya abandoned her only daughter before dropping off the map forever.But when a rural sheriff invites Caitlin to the woods of coastal Oregon to identify her mother's remains, Caitlin drops everything to face the woman she's spent a lifetime hating. Unfortunately, the body-abandoned on the land of a reclusive cult, the Daughters of God-was left faceless. Instead, Caitlin finds the diary of a woman obsessed with the end of the world, one that hints the cult's spiritual leader knows the identity of Caitlin's real father. And she's not the only one looking for clues in her mother's writing. Johnny Larsen, a violent white supremacist whose family runs the county, thinks the Daughters of God kidnapped his teenage daughter-and he'll do anything to get her back.At the top of a hill, an army of women wait for the end of days. In the town below, the Larsens plot to purify their county. Caught in the middle, Caitlin must decide which is more important-learning the truth about her past or saving Mama Maya's chosen daughters from the end of the world.
At Indiana University, someone's been studying the female student body: their dating customs, nocturnal activities?and how long they can survive in captivity. When award-winning journalist Caitlin Bergman is invited back to campus to receive an honorary degree, she finds an opportunity for a well-earned victory lap?and a chance to face the trauma that almost destroyed her as an undergrad. But her lap becomes an all-out race when a student begs her to probe an unsolved campus disappearance: Angela Chapman went out one Friday night and never came back. To find the missing woman, Caitlin must join forces with a local police detective and the department that botched her own case so long ago. But while Caitlin follows the clues behind Angela's disappearance, someone else is following her...
