After his wife's sudden death, Nick Close has decided to leave London and return to Australia, hoping that distance will bring oblivion. But Tallong, his run-down childhood home, doesn't hold much comfort either: Thirty years ago, he and his best friend Tristram were lured into the woods at the edge of town. Tristram was murdered while Nick escaped.
As Nick drives the back road home from the airport, he is disturbed to find the woods still looming darkly in the distance. A strange sense of menace and foreboding overshadows his homecoming and Nick's uneasiness grows when another child is found murdered a few days later, his death almost identical to Tristram's. Probing quietly and carefully into the shadows of the small community, Nick uncovers a long string of unexplained disappearances and brutal deaths, some over 100 years old - and every killing seems to lead back into the twisted maze of the woods. But there is one other connection. Drawn into the woods once again, Nick suddenly realises that it wasn't Tristram who was meant to die thirty years ago...