"Disaster struck when twin sisters Jennifer and Melissa Salazar went hiking with their grandmother on their sixth birthday. Melissa got lost, fell off a cliff on the rock slide above Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe and died. It looked like a tragic accident. Eight years later, fourteen-year-old Jennifer want to hire detective Owen McKenna to look into the death which she believes was a murder... When Owen begins to investigate, another body is discovered... Owen uncovers information that takes him from Tahoe to San Francisco to a rich man's private island off the coast of Santa Barbara. The man directs him to an asylum in the Nevada desert ... [where] he learns of a long-buried secret that caused the murder of Jennifer's sister and several others in her family."--Back cover.