When Thomas Archer's happy and successful life is all but ruined following a horrific attack he is presented with a perfect opportunity to exact physical revenge upon the man who caused all his grief. However the immediate consequences of his actions and in-actions are much more complicated than he imagined.
A group of teenage boys out to give their girlfriends a good scare on Homecoming night, which also happens to be Halloween, head to an abandoned house in an out-of-the-way fruit orchard where they uncover the story of a real life urban legend.
After dating several cheating husbands who pretended to be single, Rylee devises a scheme for revenge. She gets a married man drunk, convinces him that they slept together, then shows up a year later with a baby and demands money. Her blackmail plan is successful, but then she meets a single man, Max, who wants to be with her and keep the baby.
After driving husband Martin to infidelity and catching him with another, mentally unstable author Jade returns to her New Zealand home. The plan is to write a book based on the town's history, helped by the local school teacher and her college thesis protégée, and visit her father Christopher. As her editor later explains, her suspicions concerning ever more locals stem from a pathological mental condition. However, more then just paranoia comes with the horse riding incident which killed her ma, an obsessive guilt matter for her and Christopher.
