Hired by a preppy college dropout to discern the fate of a four-year-old girl who disappeared more than twenty years earlier, Kinsey Millhone investigates the young man's sketchy memories about a burial scene he believes he discovered at the age of six.

Includes stories that detail Alphabet series heroine Kinsey MIllhone's origins, as well as true tales of the author's past.

In 1979, four teenage boys from an elite private school sexually assault a fourteen-year-old classmate -- and film the attack. Not long after, the tape goes missing and the suspected thief, a fellow classmate, is murdered. In the investigation that follows, one boy turns state's evidence and two of his peers are convicted. But the ringleader escapes without a trace. Now it's 1989 and one of the perpetrators, Fritz McCabe, has been released from prison....