Kate is a young woman whose mother is dying of cancer. Gillian is an oversexed, hyper-intellectual who looks like Kate—and is sleeping with Kate’s loathsome stepfather. Jonah is Gillian’s odd but devoted stepbrother—who increasingly matches the description of the rampaging serial killer known as the Doll Collector. Though Kate desperately tries to keep herself together and shut out unwelcome memories, snippets of her family legacy keep resurfacing as the Doll Collector’s body count grows. Are the depraved murders connected to her family’s sordid history? And will Kate be able to confront the horrors of her own past before it’s too late to stop the slaughter? A “haunting and wholly engrossing story of uncommon moral complexity, with prose bright and swift as lightning,” is a complex, dark expression of a deprived heart and an exploration of the desperate lengths children will go to in order to create family in the wake of abuse (Laura van den Berg, author of ).