No bodies.
No witnesses.
No evidence.
Presumed drowned.

That's what everyone believed in 1990 after two high school seniors went missing the night before their graduation from Alexandria Bay High School in the Thousand Islands region of New York State. They were probably the ones who pulled their red canoe onto Starr Island and into the looming shadow of Quill Castle, before somehow drowning in the swift current of the St. Lawrence River.

That's exactly what probably happened.

Twenty-five years later, Opal Schatz, the newly widowed newspaper editor at The River Gazette, launches a fact-finding investigation into her family's DNA heritage and unwittingly unlocks the castle's perilous secrets and long-hidden, ghastly crimes. When FBI Agent Benjamin T. Franklin, the original agent assigned to the case, joins the investigation just days before his retirement, things go from bad to worse, revealing Opal's long-kept secret that sends her closest friends scampering into dangerous depths of betrayal, revenge, and murder.