As Tom celebrates his birthday with a group of close friends in Brooklyn, he is startled to see a woman from his distant past at the party. Jenny (or Alice, as she now calls herself) first denies even knowing Tom, but as the evening progresses, she reveals a shocking secret.

After disappearing from Tom's life 20 years earlier, she began to reinvent herself every few years, taking on a new name, a new career, and a new life each time. After giving Tom a glimpse of what life could be like if he lets go of the safety and security he has so carefully created, Alice asks him to make a choice that will change everything.

Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South's segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America's aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff.

Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam's call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Even as Virginia's Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley's all-black West Computing group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.

Here, killers aren't just the stuff of legends and campfire lore. Someone is in the nighttime shadows, watching the local teens play around in the moonlit woods, waiting for the right moment, the right victim, waiting to take away a life.

Detective Regan Pescoli is counting the days until her maternity leave. Exhausted and emotional, the last thing she needs is another suspected serial killer, especially when her daughter, Bianca, is swept up in the media storm. When a reality show arrives in town, the chaos only makes it harder for Pescoli and her partner, Selena Alvarez, to distinguish rumor from truth.

Another body is found, and another, and as the nightmare strikes closer to home, Pescoli races to find the terror lingering in the darkness, where there are too many places to hide, and countless places to die.