And There He Kept Her

Two teenagers break into a house on a remote lake, hoping to find prescription drugs. The owner, Emmett Burr, is an old man they take for easy prey. He has kept secrets in his basement for more than twenty years, and he will do whatever it takes to stop them coming out.

Once Burr gets the better of the intruders, the roles of victim, abuser and protector begin to blur. The teens vanish, and the question of who is in danger from whom does not stay simple.

Ben Packard is a former police officer who has returned to the small Minnesota town of Sandy Lake after a personal tragedy, looking for a fresh start. He now works as a sheriff's deputy and leads the search for the missing teens, driven in part by a family connection to the case.

As leads run out and the hours for finding the teens shrink, Packard has to reveal secrets of his own. He also has to dig into the buried history of the town he now calls home. This is a dark crime mystery with a suspense-driven pace, told with attention to the psychology of its characters and to how evil can take shape.