Schoolteacher Grace Penny lives in terror. Each day the mail brings a photograph of a green candle slowly burning down, along with an implied threat: when the candle burns out, you're dead. In recent psychotherapy sessions, she's recovered suppressed memo ries of ritual satanic abuse--torture, sacrifice, and murder. Now Grace believes her childhood tormentor has returned to haunt her, perhaps ultimately kill her. Graces only hope is private detective John Halting, who must figure out whether the threat is real or simply a product of his client's tormented imagination. But as he plunges into a nightmarish world where desire obscures reality, fear colors the truth, and nothing is what it seems, Graces waking nightmares threaten to become his own...