"Who put Ellen in the blackgum tree?" Decades after trespassing children spotted the desiccated corpse wedged in the treetop, no one knows the answer - or even whether the woman's name was really Ellen, as persistent graffiti seems to claim. Kate Thrush and her former college professor, Dr. Judith Kane, travel to Cinderwich, Tennessee in hopes that maybe it was their Ellen: Katie's lost aunt, Judith's long-gone lover. But they're not the only ones to have come here looking for closure. The people of Cinderwich, a town hardly more than a skeleton itself, are staunchly resistant to the outsiders' questions about Ellen and her killer. And the further the two women dig, the more rot they unearth . the closer they come to exhuming the evil that lies, hungering, at the roots of Cinderwich.