A three-year-old boy is abandoned at the side of a country road. His mother whispers to him to hold on to a wire fence. She never returns, but the boy is eventually found - holding-on so tightly the wire is cutting into his hands. Well-dressed, but without identification, the only clue to his background is a photograph of two young girls and a chatty letter from a teenager found in his pocket. Sixteen years later, Walker Devereux moves to Toronto to discover the truth about his early life. Who are his parents? Why was he abandoned? And if, as he remembers dimly, his mother loved him, what happened to her? In pursuit of answers Walker uncovers his family's dark secrets and comes within the deadly grasp of a man whose own early abandonment helped transform a lonely boy into a murderous psychopath ...