In the fall of 1993, the quiet suburb of Harting Farms is shocked when children begin to vanish, and one is found dead near December Park—a great, sweeping expanse that is sunken below the streets and surrounded on three sides by vast woodlands—a place children believe is haunted. Newspapers call the abductor the Piper because he has come to lead children away, while kids whisper darker names for him in the school halls. Angelo Mazzone and his friends discover a link to the dead girl and take up the search for the killer, vowing to stop the Piper’s reign of terror. Their teenage pledge becomes a journey of self-discovery and an odyssey into the darkness of their own hometown.