Russian professor Rowena Halley's life finally seems to be taking a turn for the better. She has a job for the summer AND the fall, her family dramas of the past spring have settled down, and she's got a promising romance going with Alex, a fellow academic and actual American. But the course of true love rarely runs smooth. Rowena's weekend of fun and good times with Alex is disrupted when one of her students goes missing, in a town that's already had more than its fair share of missing young women. Simple flakiness, or something more sinister? Rowena teams up with the student's annoying new boyfriend to try to track her down, even as she wonders if he's really the culprit behind her disappearance. Rowena's research skills are finely honed. Hopefully her survival skills are too.