Coffee County, Tennessee. 1948. Rusty Gideon works as a private investigator in a world that prefers its detectives male and its women quiet. She prefers results. A missing girl from Indiana leads her south into rural Tennessee — and into something she wasn't hired to find. The man traveling with Priscilla Rogers isn't a lovesick drifter. He's methodical. Patient. He rides the rails, slips into small towns unnoticed, and leaves entire households butchered before anyone connects the pattern. Rusty connects it. She follows the trail to Grayson, a small Coffee County town where she finds four children, a widowed veterinarian named Kip Jerrold, and the last known sighting of her target. She intends to stay a day. Maybe two. The killer has other plans. He vanishes from custody, resurfaces inside a sheriff's department a hundred miles away, and kills again — certain that another murder scene will pull the consultant to him. He learns exactly who she is. Where she is. Who she's gotten close to. He comes back to Grayson to finish it. He doesn't know she's been waiting. Burningtree is Southern Appalachian noir introducing Rusty Gideon — a sharp, morally grounded investigator who understands one thing about predators better than most: Monsters make mistakes. He thought he was hunting her.