For two small children playing on Sconset beach, it was the stuff of nightmares...digging in the damp sand, hoping to unearth buried treasure, only to uncover instead a human skeleton. But for Detective Merry Folger, who's investigating the case, the real horror isn't revealed until she learns that the bones belonged to a woman who was apparently murdered anywhere between two and ten years ago. Who was she, and who could have hated her enough to strangle her and bury her deep in Sconset dunes? Faced with the daunting task of trying to put a name to the remains, Merry begins sifting through Nantucket's missing persons file...and turns up several possibilities. The most compelling prospect is Dr. Elizabeth Osborne, a beautiful, Harvard-educated psychiatrist who mysteriously vanished from the beach eight summers ago. Merry doesn't know if Elizabeth is her victim, but looking through her records she knows that the woman got a raw deal. The detective who handled her case never followed up, never questioned her husband's role in Elizabeth's suspicious disappearance. Angered by the negligence of a fellow cop, Merry decides to reopen the case...only to have her attention diverted by a shocking piece of news that changes everything. The Massachusetts police have just arrested a man who can be linked to the grisly unsolved murders of five young women found in various parts of Boston and its suburbs, five young women who were strangled to death...like a certain unidentified woman from Nantucket. Suddenly, as Merry ponders the fact that her Sconset beach skeleton could have been a serial killer's first victim, the FBI and the media descend on the crime scene like bees on a Nantucket daffodil. But something doesn't add up, and just as Merry is beginning to wonder where this case is leading, another young woman is found brutally murdered on the island. And it isn't long before the dedicated cop finds herself defying her police chief father to play cat and mouse with a killer