Strange things are happening in the small town of Cedar Creek. A patient barely escapes having the wrong surgery performed, happily married couples split up, unusual illnesses strike, and through it all the weather is terrible, even by the standards of the Oregon Cascades. Nancy McKay owns a café in the town, and through conversations with her customers, she starts to put the pieces of the puzzle together. She discovers that-in a game of real-life telephone-the prayer requests are becoming garbled as they pass from one person to the next, and the people at the end of the chain are praying for the wrong things. Nancy's investigation turns from mere curiosity to horror as her own family is pulled into the nightmare. Her search for answers becomes a desperate race to break the prayer chain. And the answer to the most troubling question-how could God allow bad things to happen as a result of prayer?-leads to an unexpected answer that changes her life.