Game Warden Mike Bowditch investigates a brutal murder and a family's devastating secrets in the latest twisty thriller from Edgar Award-nominated author Paul Doiron.

When family friend Miriam Peters asks Bowditch to help find her missing husband, he expects to locate a wayward forager in the Maine woods. Instead he finds a body: Bogdan Peters, execution-style bullet through the forehead, bound to a tree deep inside Acadia National Park.

Bogdan was a gentle man by all accounts-a devoted husband, a new father, a maker of beautiful instruments. But the deeper Bowditch digs, the more he discovers a life shaped by secrets: a fractured family, a father who defected from the Soviet Union with powerful Russian enemies still hungry for revenge, and a Cold War mystery that someone has been willing to kill for.

Soon Bowditch finds himself dodging the FBI, who want him off the case, and a dangerous stranger newly arrived from overseas who is running his own investigation. When Bowditch's wife and young son are threatened, what began as a favor for a friend becomes a race to uncover the truth before it buries him.