Mariposa County, near Yosemite Park, was a quiet place where not much ever happened in the way of crime. So when 2 young boys stumble across the body of a young woman shot in the head Sheriff Bill Ashton figures it will be easy to solve the murder, until they find the other four bodies and discover that the bodies date back at least 5 years with the bodies placed in a ritualistic circle about a year apart. And the case gets even stranger when the coroner tells him that the victims were dead when they shot. The sheriff quickly realizes that he has a heck of a problem on his hands, since this has obviously been going on for quite some time and that since the bodies were found in a remote area, it almost had to be a native. And as if all this wasn't bad enough, the local wrecker driver brings in a bag full of money he found in a sports car he went out to tow. When he got there, the driver was gone and the money was sitting in the front seat. Unable to resist the temptation, he kept the bag but later got scared when a cell phone in it rang and a voice on the other end informed him that they would be coming to get their money and kill whoever got in their way. When the sheriff traces the car, he finds that it was stolen from Captain Arden Jones of Torrance CA. He then traces the cell phone to a Samantha Henning of Hollywood and upon contacting Captain Jones; he is informed that Samantha is her sister. Captain Jones insists on coming to Mariposa to help in the search for her sister and upon her arrival, the attraction between her and the sheriff is instant and mutual. Sheriff Ashton finds himself in the awkward position of trying solving a multiple homicide, searching for the missing girl, and fighting his attraction to Arden and trying to keep his objectivity. And just to make things even more interesting, a hit man arrives in town to find Samantha and the money and decides to go after Arden in the hopes that she will know where her sister is. Skillfully weaving back and forth between story lines, Schaefer intersperses chapters with the journals of the killer and we slowly begin to learn the true depths of the killer's insanity and must read on with horror, knowing that Arden and the sheriff will not discover the identity of the killer in time to stop another murder. But even we are taken completely by surprise when we learn the killer's identity.