A canny young woman is struggling to survive by perpetrating various levels of mostly harmless fraud. On a rainy April morning, she is reading auras at Spiritual Palms when Susan Burke walks in. A keen observer of human behavior, our unnamed narrator immediately diagnoses Susan as an unhappy woman eager to give her lovely life a drama injection. However, when the "psychic" visits the eerie Victorian home that has been the source of Susan’s terror and grief, she realizes she may not have to pretend to believe in ghosts anymore.

On a summer morning in Missouri, Nick and Amy Dunne are celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary. Or they would be, if Amy hadn't disappeared from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. As the cops close in and the stream of lies, deceits and inappropriate behavior leaks out, everyone in town is wondering how well they know the one that they love. Did Nick kill his clever and beautiful wife? If not, who did?

Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” She survived --- and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later when Libby is contacted by a secret society to reveal details from her past, she does so at a fee. As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started --- on the run from a killer.

Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful 13-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims --- a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story --- and survive this homecoming.