Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne's first encounter with Clare Fergusson was in an emergency room on a freezing December night. A newborn had been left on the steps of the town's Episcopal church, where Clare just happened to be its new priest. That night in the hospital was the beginning of an attraction so fierce, so forbidden, that both Russ and Clare risked compromising all of their ethics and beliefs...In the small community of Millers Kill, gossip spreads like wildfire. So when Russ's wife kicks him out of the house, he figures it's nobody's business but his own--until a neighbor stops by and finds Mrs. Van Alstyne's butchered corpse on the kitchen floor. To the townspeople and church folk, the murder is proof that the whispered rumors about the police chief and the priest were true. But nothing is as it seems in Millers Kill, where betrayal twists old friendships--and evil waits inside quaint white clapboard farmhouses...