As a journalist, Kristy French is never going to win a Pulitzer while she’s at The Newcastle Gazette covering bake sales and town fêtes. A missing persons report could be about to change all that. As a novelist, Ben Shelton’s career’s over before it’s begun, he’s the proverbial one hit wonder. The two of them have never met, but they’re about to become the most important people in each other’s lives. It isn’t love. It’s survival.

Johnny Lisker and has friend Alex Slater are having a beer in the local a pub after Alex’s longtime girlfriend Beth broke his heart. It should be a quiet night. It isn’t. Johnny stabs a man. Suddenly he and Alex are on the run from the law and there’s no going back.

Just outside of the village of Westbrooke, disgraced American doctor, Brent Richards, is obsessed with playing the Devil. He has manufactured a strain of virus he calls N.E.S.T., one that effects the bodies’ pain threshold as well as its need for nourishment. The side effects include blisters along the mouth, rapid weight loss — and the insatiable need to feed.

Three people are missing. Murdered.

And the death toll is not about to stop rising.

Small towns are meant to be sleepy. Safe. They are not meant to be meat. Within a single week, Kristy, Ben and Westbrooke’s residents have the comfortable safety of their world torn out from under them. People they have known all their lives turn on them and no-one knows what is happening, why, or how to stop it.

There’s blood on the streets, and the suffering has only just begun.