Renowned anthropologist Dr. Bill Brockton has spent his career surrounded by death at the Body Farm. Now he's being called upon to help solve a baffling puzzle in a remote mountain community. The mummified corpse of a young woman dead for thirty years has been discovered in a cave, the body bizarrely preserved and transformed by the environment's unique chemistry. But Brockton's investigation is threatening to open old wounds among an insularpeople who won't forget or forgive. And a long-buried secretprematurely exposed could inflame Brockton's own guilt--and the dangerous hostility of bitter enemies determined to see himfail . . . by any means necessary.