By day, she is able to escape the torment of her dreams by losing herself in work, until her world is suddenly shattered: Her daughter disappears without a trace and Lacie discovers that her nightmare man is terribly real; an unknown enemy closing in, unleashing a firestorm of terror, using flame as a weapon to stalk and terrorize Lacie, to destroy everyone and everything in her life.
Turned away by police who do not believe her story, Lacie reaches out to iconoclastic FBI loner Jack Stein for help - pulling Stein literally into the line of fire too.
The killer reaches right into Jack Stein's soul, revealing his tragic secrets and shames, pushing Stein into the emotional limit, willing him to break. Stein counters in a complex psychological pas-de-deux, using the killer's own behavior as a weapon, peeling away the unkown layers of his enemy, finding logic in seemingly illogical violence, putting a face and a name to a man who swears he has neither. All the while, Stein is guiding Lacie deeper into her own forgotton past, into a memory gone black, to learn the killer's motive and understand what in God's name Lacie has done to deserve a living Hell on earth.
Stein is a killer-hunter, but he has never come up against a killer like this. Now, the enemy is a master of illusion, using cunning and artifice to draw Lacie and Stein in close, where they must literally fight fire with fire in a white hot climactic battle of good versus evil, high up in the winter frozen Tetons, where the stakes have been dramatically raised and the depth of the killer's madness is fully revealed.
