From the critically acclaimed author of A Very Simple Crime, a chilling story of a young boy coming to grips with genuine evil. A red dirt road on a sweltering day. A car loses control, flips through the air. A woman crawls out, bloody and battered, staggers toward the boy on the bike, the one she swerved to avoid. But he runs away...

Kyle is ten in the summer of 1976, and his world is all about secrets-secrets hidden in the maze of cornfields, in caves, in the embers of scorched earth, behind creaking doors and down basement stairs...and in the darkest of hearts.

But there's a policewoman at the front door. The Paralyzed Man watches him from a neighboring porch. And no matter which way Kyle turns, no place seems safe anymore...