IT HAS BEEN A BRUTALLY COLD WINTER in the New Hampshire coastal town of Rye Harbor, leaving drifts of sea water frozen solid in the salt marsh. Finally, the weather warms enough for the ice to begin to break up and float out to sea. That's when a woman's body is found under a slab of ice left by the outgoing tide. Max, the feisty redheaded bartender at Ben's Place, recognizes that the body in the ice is her aunt's partner. This triggers a series of events that will eventually threaten Max's life as well. It is up to her best friend, Jack Beale, to unravel the mystery.

Running a marathon is hard enough by itself. To do so on trails, starting before sunrise, in the dark, is even more daunting. Throw into the mix a misguided obsession and you have all the makings of a killer run. Jack would find out that sometimes, as hard as you try, the best-laid plans don't work out quite as intended. And, that's exactly what happened when he took Max to a North Country Bed and Breakfast for a romantic weekend prior to running his first trail marathon. Those few days would draw them into a deadly mystery spanning two hundred years and 26.2 miles.

ON A STARLESS NIGHT in 1942, New Hampshire fisherman Ben Crouse takes his boat, Dorothy Kay, out of Rye Harbor in the midst of a storm to patrol against the threat of German U-boats. What-and whom-he encounters that night will change his life forever. More than half a century later, his niece, Courtney, receives a series of threatening phone calls. As she struggles to run her late uncle's restaurant, navigate a new romance, and find answers to her family's secret past, she turns to her friends Jack and Max, who must solve the mystery of Ben's legacy and save her from the delusional children...