As kids, Amelia and Kylee were found unharmed in their upstairs bedroom the night their teenage cousin Grace, who was babysitting them, vanished from the farmhouse in Beaumont, Missouri, leaving blood all over the kitchen. Grace, the first in their family to go to college instead of getting married and working at the meatpacking plant, had been on the verge of escaping their dead-end town. Her disappearance is a warning to any local girl who dared hope for better. Now, as their own high school graduation looms, Amelia and Kylee dream about fleeing Beaumont, but the likelihood of that happening seems as low as that of Grace being found. When human remains are discovered in town, the sisters think they finally know who took Grace --- but as they dig deeper into her past, they unearth long-buried secrets and a growing list of suspects.

Seventeen-year-old Sarabeth has become increasingly rebellious since her parents found God and moved their family to a remote Arkansas farmstead. She’s all but given up on escaping the farm when a masked man appears one summer morning and snatches her out of the cornfield. A week after her abduction, she’s found alongside a highway, but her family treats her like she’s tainted. There’s little hope of finding her captor, who kept Sarabeth blindfolded in the dark, never uttering a word. Five years later, Sarabeth is struggling to keep her past buried when investigator Nick Farrow calls. Convinced that her case is connected to the strikingly similar disappearance of another young girl, Farrow wants Sarabeth’s help.

Sadie Keller is determined to find out how her brother died, even if no one else thinks it’s worth investigating. Untimely deaths are all too common in rural Blackwater, Kansas, where crime and overdoses are on the rise, and the small-town police force is consumed with the recent discovery of a child’s skull in the woods. Eighteen-year-old Henley Pettit knows more than she’d like to about the seedy side of Blackwater, and she’s desperate to escape before she’s irreparably entangled in her family’s crimes. As more bones are found in the woods, time is running out for Sadie to uncover the truth and for Henley to make her escape. Both women are torn between family loyalties and the weight of the secrets they carry.

Arrowood, the most ornate and grand of the historical houses that line the Mississippi River, has a mystery it has never revealed: It’s where Arden Arrowood’s younger twin sisters vanished on her watch 20 years ago, never to be seen again. After the twins’ disappearance, Arden’s parents divorced and the Arrowoods left the big house that had been in their family for generations. Arden has held on to the hope that her sisters are still alive, and it seems she can’t move forward until she finds them. When her father dies and she inherits Arrowood, Arden returns to her childhood home determined to discover what really happened to her sisters that traumatic summer.

Lucy Dane is haunted by the murder of her friend, Cheri, along with the disappearance of her mother who she never knew. With the help of a local boy, Daniel, she sets out to uncover the mystery behind Cheri’s death. What Lucy discovers is a secret that pervades the secluded Missouri hills, and beyond that horrific revelation is a more personal one concerning what happened to her mother more than a decade earlier.