When two girls, aged ten and eleven are abducted and killed in Wind Gap, Missouri, Camille Preaker, is sent back to her home town to investigate and report on the crimes by Chicago's Daily Post. Camille, self-described 'white trash from old money' and daughter of one of the richest families in town, is a cutter - she carves words into her own skin. Long-haunted by a childhood tragedy and estranged from her mother for years, Camille suddenly finds herself installed once again in her family's Victorian mansion, reacquainting herself with her distant mother and the half-sister she barely knows, a precocious 13-year-old who holds a disquieting grip on the town and surrounds herself with a group of vampish teenage girls. As Camille struggles to remain detached from the evidence, her relationship with her neurotic, hypochondriac mother threatens to topple her hard-won mental stability. Working alongside the Sheriff, and a special agent from out of town, Camille tries to uncover the mystery of who killed these little girls and why. But there are deeper psychological puzzles: Why does Camille identify so strongly with the dead girls? What happened between Camille and her mother? And how is it connected to the death of another sister years earlier?