Comic book artist Daniel Stone never for a moment suspected that the same boy whom his fourteen-year-old daughter, Trixie, loved might inflict upon her the worst possible harm. Could the young man, who once made Trixie's face fill with light when he came to the door, have drugged and then raped her? She says that he did, and that is all it takes to make Daniel, a man with a past he has hidden even from his family, venture to hell and back in order to protect his daughter.
With a story that transports readers from small-town New England to the wilds of the Alaskan bush, and interspersed with parallel vision through the striking pen-and-ink pages of Daniel's graphic novel, Jodi Picoult probes the unbreakable bond between parent and child and the dangerous repercussions of trying to play the hero.