Abbie Devereaux lies flat on her back, her arms and legs tied down, her head covered with a hood. She senses, but can't see, the eyes that watch her. She feels the unknown hands that touch her in the dark. She knows she has been kidnapped, even though she has little memory of her most recent past. And she knows that all she has to do is stay alive, even though everything she is experiencing tells her she won't.

Miraculously, she escapes. One nightmare is over...but another is about to begin.

No one believes her story. Not the police who find her beaten and bruised on the outskirts of London, not the psychologists who interview her at the hospital. Desperate to piece together the fragments of her life and prove she is telling the truth, she returns to a strangely familiar existence. She discovers, but cannot remember why, she moved out of her boyfriend's apartment, left her job as an office planner, and moved in with a roommate who herself has mysteriously disappeared.

Now trying to reclaim both her mind and her life -and stop a monstrous psycho-killer - she must dare to retrace her steps to the place where the horror began.

Nicci French is the author of the bestsellers Secret Smile, Land of the Living, The Red Room, Beneath the Skin, and Killing Me Softly, as well as two earlier books, The Memory Game and The Safe House, both published in England to great acclaim.