One July night, 10-year-old Ethan and his best friend and neighbor, Billy, fell asleep in a tent on a manicured lawn in a quaint New Jersey cul-de-sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. During the night, someone had sliced the tent open with a knife and taken Billy. He was never seen again. Thirty years later, Ethan has reluctantly returned to his childhood home. Someone seems to be roaming the cul-de-sac at odd hours, and signs of Billy’s presence keep appearing in Ethan’s backyard. Is someone playing a cruel prank? Or has Billy, long thought to be dead, somehow returned to Hemlock Circle? The closer Ethan gets to the truth, the more he realizes that no place --- be it quiet forest or suburban street --- is completely safe. And that the past has a way of haunting the present.