On Citrus County, Florida's Withlacoochee River, retired New Jersey Superior Court Judge and avid birder Owen Morganweck is brutally murdered. Because his body is never found in the alligator-filled waterway and other evidence is not definitive, the cause of death is ruled accidental. In Schooner Beach, New Jersey, Molly Joine's window screen is quietly raised as she sleeps, and a man's muscled arm reaches inside to fondle the pretty 12 year old in her bed. She awakes, screaming in terror. Three more such bizarre incidents shock and outrage the police and citizenry, but the popular seashore community's one-man crime wave has only begun. On the last day of the school year, seventh grader Angela Blake, a blonde, as are all the young victims, gets off her bus, but she never arrives home. The local police department's sole female officer, Detective Faith Alloway, investigates the strange groping assaults and spearheads the expanding investigation, joined by the county's major crime squad when the elusive sexual predator kidnaps Angela. Police are convinced they search for a pedophile who abducted Angela because she best fits some sicko notion he has of an ideal victim: young, innocent, blue-eyed, blond. Retired school teacher Ivy Hedgepeth, who is also Schooner Beach PD's records clerk as well as Blake family friend and neighbor, thinks the official assessment shortsighted. Conducting her own unofficial investigation, she proposes the kidnapper has not chosen Angela because of some abstract ideal. He did it because, of all the girls, she looks most like Faith Alloway did at Angela's age. What is more, Ivy anticipates Detective Alloway herself will be the kidnapper's next victim. Police scoff at what they call Ivy's cockamamie theory. Until Faith actually disappears.