Hardly a day goes by when nine-year-old Laurent Lepage doesn't cry wolf. His tales are so extraordinary that no one can possibly believe him, including Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache, who now live in the Quebec village of Three Pine. But when the boy disappears, the villagers are faced with the possibility that one of his tall tales might have been true. And so begins a frantic search for the boy and the truth. What they uncover deep in the forest sets off a sequence of events that leads to murder, an old crime, an old betrayal, and right to the door of an old poet.