A brutal serial killer stalks the million-acre Ottawa National Forest in Michigan's western Upper Peninsula, a man who can vanish into the vast woodlands without leaving a trace. The fragile local economy is paralyzed while authorities search for him.

Will the elusive fugitive be brought to ground before he kills again? Is the killer a man with human motivations as they are now understood, however warped as they might be, or is he something else, a throwback to past times, times not seen for hundreds of years? The contradictions confound his pursuers.

Law enforcement struggles with the new realities of the post-9/11 world in the sleepy backwater that is Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Suddenly, international tensions explode in the U.P. from a completely unexpected quarter. Thus begins a trail of events that leads inevitably to disaster, as ancient prophecies are fulfilled and as family tragedies come full circle.

Foreign agents introduce small nuclear devices into the Upper Peninsula in an attempt to retrieve one of their scientists, a physicist involved in cutting-edge technology, who has been kidnapped from his country and who is being...