Scary stories told around a bonfire are fun ... until your life becomes one.

Twelve years ago, teenage Alice and her father Jon were finding their feet in a new hometown after losing Alice's mother to cancer. Trying their best to escape their grief by moving across the country, they settled into a rundown cottage in a small lakeside town called Tall Pines.

The postcard-perfect Otago landscape hides a deep divide between the rich listers in their holiday homes and the working class who live there year-round, and both Alice and Jon find it hard to form ties in a community that's deeply suspicious of newcomers. Any attempt to start afresh is ruined when Alice's one new friend from high school, Mia, turns up dead in Jon's bed after a local party goes off the rails. Jon disappears into the woods and Alice flees Tall Pines after everyone assumes her dad is the murderer.

More than a decade later, redundancy and an expensive divorce mean Alice has to return to what the town has dubbed 'the murder house' to put it on the market. Now a journalist, Alice decides to investigate what really happened that night. She finds Tall Pines as toxic as ever - the locals remain desperate to believe her still-missing dad is the killer rather than delving too deeply into the town's own troubled past.

But when Mia's tragic death is linked to another unsolved murder, two dead girls start to look less like an accident and more like a pattern.

A gripping, darkly funny thriller about a small town with secrets and a compelling heroine hell-bent on clearing her family name.