There are none so blind as those who will not see. And Lindsey Witherspoon, used to capturing the world with her camera, to controlling the images that met her eyes, refused to see that the swamp was beyond her control.

The swamp that spread so tantalizingly beyond her door, beckoning with promises of beauty never yet captured on film, was in truth a place of darkness, a place where a woman had no business to walk alone, unprotected. Where the paths themselves seemed to shift and shiver. Where a woman who wasn't careful might find herself alone with a man like Royce Blanchard. A man who had warned her that his last woman had come into the swamp . . . and died.