What if Sean Courtland’s Chevy truck had broken down somewhere else? What if he’d never met Denise Givens, a waitress at a tavern in the Wisconsin town where he lands? Or Dan Young, a young man like Sean drifting through, having fled Minnesota for reasons unknown? Together Sean and Dan pick up work for an old man named Marion Devereaux, and Sean gets drawn into the lives of Denise and her father --- and of the townspeople, all haunted by the disappearance of three young boys decades ago. Observing them is Detective Corinne Viegas, a woman whose drive to seek justice comes from her father's failure to find those boys and the violence done to her sister. An irreversible chain of events is set in motion that culminates in violence, and the revelation of long-buried truths.

In the dead of winter, state troopers pull two young women and their car from an icy river. One is found downriver, drowned, while the other is found at the scene --- half frozen but alive. What happened was no accident, and news of the crime awakens the community’s memories of another young woman who lost her life in the same river 10 years earlier, and whose killer may still live among them. Determined to find answers, the surviving young woman soon realizes that she’s connected to the earlier unsolved case by more than just a river. The deeper she plunges into her own investigation, the closer she comes to dangerous truths, and to the violence that simmers just below the surface of her hometown.

DESCENT is the story of a family undone by the disappearance of a daughter who went out for a morning run and didn’t come back. The girl’s vanishing is the beginning of the family’s harrowing journey down increasingly divergent and solitary paths, until all that continues to bind them to each other are the questions they can never bring themselves to ask: At what point does a family stop searching? At what point does a girl stop fighting for her life?