“… how do you describe that moment when the lights go out in someone's eyes and the darkness takes over? They become something you can’t reason with, something whose conscience you can't appeal to—like a shark or a machine. They look human, but they're not. Not in the sense that the majority of us understand, anyway. They have no moral code. They become less than human—inadequate, incomplete. And that incompleteness can make them dangerous, even deadly.”
When Ruth Gemmill’s younger brother Alex fails to return her calls, she sets off to check up on him. Unable to find him in Greenwell, the town where he has been living and teaching, she begins her tentative enquiries. She soon discovers the locals to be frustratingly unhelpful, while the eerie town holds more questions than clues. Why are the police so uncooperative? Why is Greenwell so dark and lonely? And who is the “grey man” the schoolchildren saw Alex with not long before he went missing?
As Ruth becomes concerned that something terrible has happened to her brother, events escalate mysteriously, dangerously out of control. Then in one fearful moment she is sure she glimpses the abusive ex-boyfriend she left behind in London, the man who caused her years of tortuous pain. Too late, Ruth realizes that her worst fears haunt her still, and that she is at the center of a far darker nightmare than she could ever have imagined …
