After Del Walker fled her small hometown and its cult-like church, she vowed never to return. The man she loved, Lars, left her to marry the local golden girl Eve, and their romance is now the focus of Eve’s viral blog espousing the pastor’s conservative philosophy about women and marriage. But six years later, Lars is suddenly killed, and she’s convinced it couldn’t have been an accident. When Del returns to her hometown for the funeral, she discovers that the now mega-church --- and the insidious, patriarchal teachings of Pastor Rick Franklin --- has grown not only in size but in influence. She is determined to cut through the church’s lies and corruption to find out who killed Lars, even if it means confronting the religious trauma she’s spent years trying to bury.

Elle Castillo hosts a popular true crime podcast that focuses on cold cases of missing and abducted children. After four seasons of successfully solving these cases in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Elle decides to tackle her white whale: The Countdown Killer. Twenty years ago, TCK was terrorizing the community, kidnapping and ritualistically murdering three girls over seven days, each a year younger than the last. Then, after he took his 11-year-old victim, the pattern --- and the murders --- abruptly stopped. When Elle follows up on a listener tip only to discover the man’s dead body, she feels at fault. Then, within days, a child is abducted --- a young girl who seems to fit suspiciously into the TCK sequence halted decades before.