Thirty years ago, police chief Edward Shank killed the most notorious serial killer in Seattle's history: the Beacon Hill Butcher. Now eighty years old and retired, he's given his high-maintenance Victorian home to his grandson, Matt, and settled into a quiet life at the nearby Sweetbay Village Retirement Residence. While renovating, Matt discovers a crate buried in the backyard that holds a secret so terrible, it threatens to ruin all their lives if it ever gets out. Especially that of Sam, his girlfriend, whose mother was killed when she was only two years old. Matt struggles with his dark family secret as Sam's obsession with solving her mother's murder grows. A true crime writer now working on a book about the Beacon Hill Butcher, Sam has always suspected her mother was one of his victims, even though she was murdered two years after the Butcher was killed. But then new victims begin to turn up, and the more she digs into the old murders, the more dangerous it gets...Turns out, the truth is closer to home than she ever could have imagined.