In the wake of a huge storm, three bodies are discovered in the rubble of a partially collapsed building in an industrial part of Paradise known as The Swap. One, a man wrapped in a blue tarp, is only hours old. But found within feet of that body are the skeletal remains of two teenage girls who had gone missing during a Fourth of July celebration twenty-five years earlier.

Not only does the earlier crime predate Police Chief Jesse Stone’s arrival in Paradise, but the dead girls were close friends of one of Jesse’s right hand officers, Molly Crane. Things become even more complicated when one of the dead girls’ mothers returns to Paradise to bury her daughter and is promptly murdered. It’s up to Stone to pull off the veil of the past to see if, and if so how, all the murders are connected.