Sombres Secrets

In Los Angeles, psychologist Wendy Brown witnessed her abusive brother-in-law beat up her sister, who eventually died from her injuries. During that incident, Wendy shot him dead in self-defense. To get away from that nightmare, she has moved to the small town of Corinth, Oregon, located in an emerging ski area. In Corinth, she has temporarily opened up her home, which she calls Comfort House, as a refuge for battered women, while she builds a more permanent Comfort House on her acreage. She has found that there is a culture of wife beating in Corinth, especially among the hyper-masculine hunting crowd. The police do nothing about reports of abuse as the sheriff, "Bear" Trapp, is included within that hunting crowd, his friends who are among the accused wife beaters, most of that crowd's wives who are currently residing at Comfort House. When one of those husbands is found shot dead in his home, Sheriff Trapp, taking the path of least resistance, rules the death a suicide, and refuses to follow-up. However, his deputy, a man named Curtis who has just started dating Wendy, believes it was murder. Curtis' murder theory gains greater plausibility when another husband of a Comfort House resident is found dead. At the same time, Wendy notices that she is being stalked by someone driving a dark colored pickup truck, she believing her stalker's end goal being to implicate her as the murderer. Wendy and Curtis try to find out who is killing the husbands, and whether more are targeted in order to protect Wendy both from her stalker and from Trapp, who already does not like Wendy and will use whatever excuse to charge her. If Wendy and Curtis do discover the truth, they will find a plot more complicated than they first imagined.