AKOOLFILM COMPANY

Nate Field was a good detective once. Twenty years ago he walked away from everything — his career, his family, his reputation — when he became convinced that a seemingly ordinary elderly couple named Harley and Edna Whalen were responsible for a string of killings across North America. Nobody believed him. The Whalens were charming, harmless, and ancient. And they had vanished.

Now Nate is a burned-out private investigator living out of a trailer, surviving on bad coffee and obsession, when a new disappearance pins the Whalens to a quiet town in rural Ontario. He follows the lead north into a hard Canadian winter — and finds them exactly where he feared, settled into a grand stone inn as caretakers, bickering over tea and waiting.

What the Whalens are waiting for is harder to explain. Harley and Edna have lived for over three hundred years by feeding on the flesh of those who deserve it — predators, abusers, the guilty and the cruel. It is not murder, in their minds. It is maintenance. But Edna is fading, and the hunger that has sustained them is losing its power.

Into this world arrives Hope — a young woman in black gothic clothing who works in the local craft store, falls cautiously in love with a gentle boy named Jacob, and slips away to a stone church to speak quietly with the reverend about sins she cannot name. Hope carries a secret darker than any of them. Her name is not the only thing she shares with someone else.