In the wilderness bordering Afghanistan, an American soldier dies in a devastating explosion. Across the world, in a withering Pennsylvania factory town, his father is stabbed to death and left in the surrounding woods amidst colonial ruins known as Nowhere. The Recruiter wants Cameron Winter to find out why. All Winter wants now is a quiet, happy existence. He has met the woman he plans to marry. He has beaten the depression that sent him into therapy. He's enjoying a job at a midwestern university, teaching the poetry he loves. Then his old boss, the hunted former leader of a group of US government assassins, suddenly reappears and asks him to set that life aside and return instead to the work he did as a government agent: the work of turning bad men into dead men. Winter journeys into America's aching heartland, to a small town called Kinnecombe, abandoned by business, betrayed by the government, and left to suffer through a triple plague of poverty, drugs, and crime. His assignment is to solve a murder, and all that stands in his way is a deceptively soft-spoken gangster, a mob of local thugs, an American spy as crazy as she is beautiful, and a well-trained killer who can make himself invisible right up until the moment he puts a bullet in your brain. If Winter wants to reclaim his dream life, he'll first have to remember how to be an assassin, or else find himself in Nowhere, just as dead as the town that wants him gone.