The Bodies Left Behind (abridged)

A spring night in a small town in Wisconsin. . . .A call to police emergency from a distant lake house is cut short. . . . A phone glitch or an aborted report of a crime? Off-duty deputy Anna McCafferty leaves her family's dinner table and drives up to deserted Lake Mondac to find out. She stumbles onto the scene of a heinous murder. . . . Before she can call for backup, though, she finds herself the next potential victim. Deprived of her phone, weapon and car, Anna flees, along with the 25-year-old daughter of the murdered couple. These unlikely allies--women from city and small town--can survive only by fleeing into the dense, deserted woods, on a desperate trek to safety and ultimately to the choice to fight back. The professional criminals, also strangers to this hostile setting, must forge a tense alliance too, in order to find and kill the two witnesses to the crime.The incident has implications that extend beyond the relentless hunt in the Midwest wilderness, affecting a union boss under federal investigation, the sheriff whom Anna works for . . . and Anna's husband, who is forced to question his own response to his wife's plight.The Bodies Left Behind is both a cat-and-mouse chase that takes place virtually in real-time and a harrowing look at the consequences of heartless evil.