Growing up in rural Georgia during the 1940's, Joseph Vaughan finds himself at the center of a series of mutilations and killings of young girls. Just a teenager, Joseph becomes determined to protect his community from the killer, but he is powerless in preventing more murders-and no one is ever caught. Ten years later one of his neighbors is found hanging from a rope, surrounded by belongings of the dead girls; the killings cease, and the nightmare appears to be over. Desperate and plagued by everything he has witnessed, Joseph sets out to forge a new life in New York. But even there the past won't leave him alone-for it seems that the murderer still lives and is killing again, and that the secret to his identity lies in Joseph's own history.