Atherton University, freshman year.Kathryn, Randall, and Jesse come from different worlds, but find themselves drawn together in unexpected ways. For each of them, college promises a bright future and a way to disconnect from a dark, haunted past. But as winter sets in, their secret histories threaten to disrupt the layers of deceit that protect their fragile new lives. One dark night a professor's wife is found drowned in an icy river, and rumors of murder threaten the safe haven of Atherton. Within days, Randall's illicit affair with the professor is about to be revealed in the local press. Then, an old mystery emerges from the shadows - the discovery of a co-ed's corpse in a frozen creek twenty years before makes these accidents of the past and the present look a little too closely connected. Gradually, the three friends find themselves snared in a web of lies, a web spun long before their days at Atherton. Snowbound on the university campus, they are unwitting captives of a malevolent force that drives them inexorably toward the "snow garden" of the title - a place of nightmares that is all too real, and all too near.