About to turn 40, there's no doubt in her mind that suburban wife and mother-of-two Claire Taylor has settled. A wild week in Chicago may have shaken things up a bit, but as she turns the key in her Wisconsin home on the eve of Hallowe'en, she knows that this is where her life is. Except that it's all gone. The house stripped, her husband Danny, her daughters, all gone: no message, nothing. By dawn next morning, her supposedly mortgage-free home has been foreclosed against, one of Danny's childhood friends lies dead in her backyard, and Claire is caught up in a nightmare that began with her husband on Hallowe'en night, 1976. A nightmare that reaches its terrifying climax 35 years later.