From the small towns of Appalachia they came, the young men who joined the fight for liberty in World War II. Now they are elderly, and some of them--like Harmon Strayer, father of prosecutor Bell Elkins's former law school classmate--suffer from Alzheimer's. When Harmon dies in an Alzheimer's care facility from what appear to be natural causes, Bell confronts a mystery that brims with questions about memory, grief and the lethal cost of burying the past. During a winter of record snow and cold, Bell and the people of Acker's Gap, West Virginia, face isolation and hardship--and the threat from a killer who preys upon the old and the sick and the helpless.