When the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, rocked the world, the sudden disappearance of sixteen-year-old Ashley Morgan from a classy neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina, was hardly headline news. Twenty-three years later, Ashley’s sister, Jessica, approaches Detective Red Calendar of the Cold Case Unit with an impossible request: Can you find out what happened to my sister?
Red is in a bad place, devastated by her breakup with her longtime lover, Gina. Red thinks the powerful attraction she feels toward Jess, a divorced mother of a teenage daughter, is as impossible as Jess’s request. Yet Red reopens Ashley’s cold case and learns that Ashley was one of seven lost girls gone missing from 2000 to 2002—all presumed dead at the hands of a serial killer who was never brought to justice. By the time Red realizes that the attraction she feels for Jess is mutual and they begin a passionate affair, the investigation heats up and awakens dangerous old ghosts. Clues lead Red to Fun Zone, an abandoned nightclub where Ashley and her friends used drugs, gambled, and sometimes got pimped out to older men. Red discovers a “haunted” gravesite in an abandoned reform school that produces the bodies of most of the lost girls.
After Red and Jess come under fire from a now-elderly serial killer, Red learns about a secret sisterhood of women helping women escape abuse via an Underground Railroad network, with safe houses throughout the Southeast. The sisterhood sends Red and Jess to the sultry streets of New Orleans. There, with the pressure on, both personally and professionally, Red wonders if Ashley’s story will ever be told, and who will live to tell it?
