A young boy's disappearance from the southern hamlet of Niceville sets off a series of events that will expose the dark secret festering below the town's pleasant exterior. Elmore Leonard has said of this gripping novel: "Terrific dialogue, oddball characters, and a wild story... A great read."

One fine spring day in Niceville, a young boy named Rainey Teague disappears on his way home from school. Literally disappears--security camera footage captures the moment of his instant, inexplicable vanishing. The search for the boy is led by ex-Special Forces veteran Nick Kavanaugh, now a detective with the local police and no stranger to lowlifes and their criminal hijinks. In the nightmare that follows Rainey's disappearance, Nick and his wife, Kate, a family practice lawyer, find themselves drawn into a shadow world between life and death, where they will come face-to-face with an ancient malevolent power that lies beneath Niceville, darker and older than the mountain forest surrounding its source: a 1,000-foot-deep pit known as Crater Sink.