He is the worst of the worst; a perverted deviant and an elusive killer who presents himself as an old-fashioned country preacher. She is the distraught widow of a man who successfully embezzled a fortune. With her two young children, she lives amid the dilapidated ruins of a declining estate named Slate Gardens, where rumor insists three million dollars remains hidden. Beguiled by the preacher's psychotic manipulations, the widow takes him into her home as her second husband and a malign father to her vulnerable son and daughter. She longs for companionship and love. He craves only profit. A...

Dire questions inevitably linger when someone disappears from a troubled marriage... from a troubled life... from the entire world. When Efren Sinclair's wife takes a permanent vacation from their comfortable existence, all eyes turn to him, accusatory and condemning. Everyone is certain he murdered her. Nobody believes the 'woman' calling his children each night before bedtime is Leah Sinclair. Instead, his family and friends suspect her husband has alibied himself with an industrial grade Live-Jack, an artificially intelligent system capable of passing the forensic Turing Test for...