In 1999, 13 year-old Meghan McNamara was abducted from her home, her parents and younger brother brutally slain. The intense search for her would eventually dwindle down to a cold case and local legend and Meghan was presumed dead. Then five years later, an 18 year-old woman emerges from the Wisconsin woods, dazed, undernourished, and announces she’s Meghan and doesn’t know what year it is. She tells the police where to find her captor. He is found and pleads guilty to the felonies. 

She's ostensibly the only survivor in the Fox River series of murders and is given the mystique of The One That Got Away. Meghan struggles to put her life together and reinsert herself back into a world that had left her for dead. Laboring under a psychiatric malady she calls “voice deafness,” she can hear and understand words but all voices are indistinct and sound alike. 

Fifteen years later, she's a detective in the same small Wisconsin town in which she was raised and she's obsessed with the case that was supposedly solved when the alleged killer confessed. But when a single mother is murdered and her 12 year-old daughter goes missing, Meghan is more convinced than ever that the killer is still on the loose. And McNamara’s efforts are getting resistance not just from the real killer but also her own department that had arrested him and the DA's office that may have put away an innocent man for life.