Maverick psychologist Ellie Brynne has a head full of trauma and an empty desk, relegated to the research department of an inept criminal task force whose greatest accomplishment was getting cornhole approved as an officially sanctioned police activity. When a cult begins murdering the faculty at her university, she thinks she’s hit the lottery: all the gore you could want, and oddball suspects galore. Turns out murder is a great distraction when you’re trying to avoid your own mounting pile of psychoses.

Hopelessly outmanned, the task force calls in the esteemed Inspector Gérard Renault to lead the charge. Ellie’s new partner may look like a romance novel on wheels, but he acts like a one-man wrecking crew: shadowy and sullen one moment, smoldering the next. The broken detective’s razor-sharp mind has been dulled by one too many secrets, and it’s up to Ellie to coax him out of his tortured stupor before the bodies start to pile up. Between her tenuous grasp on reality and his ever-expanding web of lies, can this unlikely duo unravel a conspiracy that penetrates deep into the roots of a sleepy New England town where the only constant is dissonance?