Bernadette Saint Clare is an FBI agent with a difference: she has an unerring but uncanny knack for apprehending killers. Her ability makes her a dangerous maverick in the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

Her reward is a backwater posting to Minnesota, but on her very first day a mutilated body is found: the killing is the work of a vigilante killer intent on settling old scores. Soon more bodies appear up and down the Mississippi. All are evildoers who have preyed on the innocent.

Forensic investigation is too slow for the dizzying sequence of events that now take place. Bernadette is catapulted from the heart-stopping sequence of slayings into a chase where stalker and prey swap places and where she will be taken to the very brink of sanity.