When Jenna Rosen abandons her comfortable Seattle life to revisit Wrangell, Alaska, it's a wrenching return to her past. Long ago the home of her Native American grandmother, Wrangell is located near the Thunder Bay resort where Jenna's young son, Bobby, drowned two years before. There, determined to lay to rest the aching mystery of his death, she hears whispers of Tlingit legends that tell of powerful, menacing forces -- and discovers a frightening new possibility about Bobby's fate.

Warned by a practicing shaman against disturbing the legendary "kushtaka" -- soul-stealing predators that stalk the netherworld between land and sea, the living and the dead -- Jenna turns to Eddie, a local fisherman, to help her separate fact from myth. But she can't deny her protective motherly instincts, and Jenna's quest for the truth about her son -- and the strength of her beliefs -- is about to pull her into a terrifying, life-changing abyss....