Her name means “reborn.” And she’s hoping to become someone else, someone else who isn’t wanted for a murder she’d planned, an execution she’d fantasized about. A killing that needed to be done.

She’s only 25, but Renata Drake has already lived a few lives. Born in Chicago to an honest cop and his Polish, library-loving wife, Renata lost her parents to a drunk driver at a young age and like that, her childhood was over. Eventually, she and her younger sister Josie made their way, Renata into a law career as a defense attorney, Josie to political non-profits in Washington, DC.

Then Josie was brutally murdered by a serial criminal—a killer justice would never touch because he was the son of the Soviet Ambassador—and much of Renata died with her sister.

Traumatized, lost, the best part of her gone, Renata fantasized about executing Sergei Grinkov herself. And in the summer of 1985, when the Ambassador’s son returned to Washington … the fantasy became reality.. 

Renata’s world ended twice. Can she find another? Her plan is to disappear in Humboldt County, California, be lost and never found. She’s crossing the country to a place she’s never seen, a place she knows only from an old postcard from her parents and a Viewmaster reel from her childhood.  

But what she doesn’t know is that there’s already a serial killer waiting in this remote, rural community that survives on illegal drug traffic … a serial killer who preys on young women …