Summer, 1979. A hot, Northern California school vacation stretches before Rachel and her younger sister Patty--the daughters of a larger-than-life, irresistibly handsome detective father and the mother whose heart he broke.

Left to their own devices, the sisters spend their days studying record jackets, concocting elaborate fantasies about a mysterious neighbor, and playing dangerous games on the mountain that looms behind their house.

When young women start turning up dead on the mountain, the girls' father is put in charge of finding the murderer. Watching her father's life slowly unravel as months pass and more women are killed, Rachel embarks on her most dangerous game yet . . . using herself as bait to catch the killer. But, rather than cracking the case, the consequences of Rachel's actions will destroy her father's career and alter forever the lives of everyone she loves.

Thirty years later, still haunted by the belief that the killer remains at large, Rachel constructs a new strategy to smoke out the Sunset Strangler and vindicate her father--a plan that unexpectedly unearths a long-buried family secret.