Carolyn Troyer is the Healer. She is also just a girl with a much-prized gift she finds hard to bear - she is able to heal the sick, to drive out foul spirits. But her father Ross is a brutal man: unyielding, tempestuous and violent - he finds it hard to accommodate his daughter's abilities in the way she would wish.
Wakelin, a journalist up from the city sent by his magazine to secure a story about Caroline, comes between father and daughter and sets off a cataclysm. Entranced both by the girl and by the landscape around her, he buys from a persuasive agent - who has problems of her own - a fisherman's lakeside cabin. It is derelict and utterly inaccessible, standing in the midst of a vast forest in which he - and others - all too easily lose their way. The cabin comes to be the centre of a storm, and those who heal and those who would be healed swirl into a vortex of vengeance and violence - a mael-strom that is reflected beyond its four walls in tempest and floods of terrifying momentum.
