As a Northern California wedding florist with a modestly flourishing business, author Gina DePaulo had an orderly and quiet life - that is until one spring afternoon in 2005 when she was struck unconscious during a mugging and suffered a devastating head trauma.

Aside from the physical problems it generated, the injury triggered an onslaught of jumbled old memories; in particular, the vivid recall of an entirely different trauma, a nearly faded crime that happened to her almost four decades earlier.

After such a long passage of time, the memory visions made her compelled to learn the identity of the man who abducted her and seemingly intended to kill her back in 1969.

A chance newspaper article seemed to hold some possible clues to the mystery man, sparking a quest for the truth by working with a forensic criminalist.

What started out as a simple desire to put the 1969 crime to rest by seeking a photograph of her long ago abductor turned into a complex journey of surprising turns and startling conclusions.

On the hunt for the identity of her would-be killer, she traveled down a shadowy road inhabited by past serial killers, present and past detectives, and the many girls that went mysteriously missing in the area where the old crime took place.

As each disturbing facet of the investigation was revealed, it generated not only new memories of the 1969 crime but also persistent recollections of Gina's early family life in Los Angeles as the joys, sorrows and secrets of her troubled childhood spilled out.

She soon sensed that her childhood was interwoven into the untangling and healing of the old crime and realized that it was up to her alone to make sense of it all and to finally open the long hidden doors of her past.