Popular, intelligent, pretty, and vivacious, Alexis Tate is a young woman any mother would be proud to claim as her daughter, except for one thing; she is a self-appointed vigilante, beginning a newly realized “calling,” one in which she seeks to identify, entice, and kill men who viciously prey on young women.

SYNOPSIS:

Walter Harrison is a successful and well-liked Seattle businessman who lives a secret life, frequenting Internet chat rooms and misrepresenting himself as a college student in a ploy to lure teenaged girls into meeting him. Abducting a victim, he brutally seeks to mold her into the embodiment of the woman of his dreams. Inevitably he finds each girl unsatisfactory, however. He then murders them and his perverse search continues. As the numbers of Harrison’s victims mount, John Caldwell and his fellow Seattle detective Frank Chapman investigate the crimes. Although clues are scarce, the two officers work feverishly to piece together enough clues to stop the Woodsman before he kills again.

In contrast to the fear that grips many of the city’s young female inhabitants, Alex Tate is enjoying a summer of friends, family and making preparations for a bright future. She is also grooming her first victim, a convicted pedophile posing online as a University of Washington freshman. Despite making some mistakes, Alex successfully claims her first kill. Although she is better prepared the next time, she finds the world is not as black and white as she had previously believed.

Inexorably, the paths of the two killers, the middle-aged predator and the teenaged neophyte, become entwined. At the same time, an unexpected lead sends Detective Caldwell to Walter and Alex's inevitably deadly rendezvous. In the novel’s climax, Alex exacts justice for the Woodsman’s victims, but at a terrible personal cost.