Paul Rice is asked once again to find a missing teenager. This time, it's a pretty blonde female, and his search takes him to a resort town in upper Minnesota near the Canadian border where women have been disappearing and their male companions winding up drowned in the nearby Chenequa River. He finds Meriden to be a strange town with even stranger inhabitants who have a connection to a forty-year-old mine disaster, a famous horror writer who lives there, an unusual witness, and a helpful priest who has a hidden reason of his own for lending a hand.