Will Trent has taken his partner Faith Mitchell to the hospital because she passed out. While he is waiting, an ambulance brings in a woman who has been hit by a car. She is naked and has obviously been kept captive somewhere and been tortured. Even more horribly, her eleventh rib has been removed.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has to be invited into a case, but Will drives to the crime scene, which is only being investigated near the road. The police try to send him away, but he enters the nearby woods to try to find where the woman was escaping from. He finds a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of plywood. Inside the man-made cave, he finds indications that two women were there. Eventually, he finds a second woman hanging upside down from a tree, dead. This woman has been blinded.
Back at the hospital, the doctor, Sara Linton (who apparently is the heroine of a different series by Slaughter), tells Faith she is diabetic. This condition is complicated because Faith is also pregnant.
For his part, Will has married his lover Angie, but she took off almost immediately afterwards. To his dismay, Will finds Sara, a widow, attractive.
As Will and Faith try to identify the victims, with the local police withholding evidence, another woman disappears. Because she physically resembles both victims, Will and Faith think she might be another victim of the same person.
This is another fast moving and interesting entrant to this series about a dyslexic detective and his partner.
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