For more than thirty years the case has remained stone cold - the brutal murder of a local Papago girl, her butchered body found stuffed into a large cooler that was left on the side of Highway 86. No one ever paid for the horrific crime...except, that is, the victim's loved ones who suffer to this day. Brandon Walker, once the Sheriff of Pima County, Arizona, no longer feels he has a purpose. A reluctant retiree living in the long shadow of his wife Diana Ladd, a successful author of true-crime books, he is boed with golf, and more so with life. Salvation, though, comes with an invitation to join the ranks of The Last Chance, an exclusive nationwide fraternity of former cops and forensic experts who look into unsoved murders that have baffled local law enforement agencies. And one such case is staring Brandon in the face with cold, dead, entreating eyes - a murder investigation that may have been mishandled by his department when he was a young law man. The trail of a sadistic, calculating and clood-chillingly efficient killer soon leads Brandon into the strange world at the border between forensic science and tribal mysticism: a place where evil hides behind a perfect facade. Now the seeds of terror sown three decades earlier have bloomed and are bearing awful fruit. A forgotten homicide in the Arizona desert is only the beginning of the nightmare that is about to ensnarea diligent ex-cop and his family, for Brandon Walker is the only one still alive who can unravel a blood knot of terror and obsession that will free a dark truth more frightening than he ever imagined.