While Seth O'Malley is healing from a gun shot wound (received in The Cigarette Killer), Ava and her team is awarded a grant to look into cold cases in rural areas of Colorado with Seth as the consulting detective. No sooner than the grant is awarded, when Seth receives a request to look into the brutal murder of a young woman in Kiowa County, near the border of Colorado and Kansas.
Ava and her team discover that the girl was buried on top of a previously undiscovered archaeological site. Every step Ava takes to uncover who killed this poor young woman, the closer she gets to her own dark family history.