Jackal

In June 1985, 10-year-old Alice Walker, a Black girl living in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, vanishes after following friends into the woods. She is found dead, her chest torn open and her heart missing. Her death is ruled accidental. This opening, narrated by a mysterious first-person voice later revealed as a supernatural creature called the Jackal, establishes a pattern of violence against Black girls spanning more than three decades.

Thirty-two years later, Liz Rocher, a 32-year-old Black woman living in New York City, reluctantly returns to Johnstown for the wedding of her best friend, Melissa "Mel" Parker, to Garrett Washington. Liz grew up as one of three Black kids in her school, branded an "Oreo" for not fitting racial stereotypes. Mel, a white girl, befriended her in middle school. Liz attends alone after leaving her physically abusive ex-fiancé, Alex Edwards, and manages anxiety through therapy techniques, including pressing a thick scar on her wrist that dates to a traumatic night in the woods during high school.

At the train station, a woman named Denise, a local mother seeking justice for her murdered daughter, pushes a yellowed flyer into Liz's hands. Liz pockets it without reading it. She arrives at the home of her mother, Marie, a retired Haitian-born physician who critiques Liz's appearance and single status. Liz notices a security bar on the sliding back door and bags of unpopped popcorn hidden in a drawer, details whose significance she does not yet grasp.

The wedding takes place on wooded land owned by Mel's brother, Nick Parker, a beat cop with a history of racism toward Liz. At the reception, Liz reconnects with Chris Hartmann, her high school crush, now a local bar owner. She plays outside the barn with Caroline Washington, Mel and Garrett's nine-year-old biracial daughter and Liz's goddaughter. When Liz steps inside briefly, Caroline vanishes. Searching the woods, Liz glimpses a large, dark, dog-like shape and finds a strip of Caroline's dress soaked in blood. The wedding dissolves into a frantic search.

At the police station, Liz has her fingerprints and DNA collected and meets Doug Nowak, a lab technician from the medical examiner's office who is oddly fixated on her. Back home, she reads Denise's flyer: It bears the yearbook photo of Keisha Woodson, a Black classmate who disappeared from a bonfire party in 2002 and was found dead with her chest torn open and her heart missing. Interspersed chapters narrated by the Jackal reveal each victim was taken by a figure the narrator calls "the Fellow."

As the search for Caroline stalls, Liz investigates on her own. She tracks down Denise, Keisha's mother, who reveals that Black girls have been vanishing every summer near the solstice for decades. Denise arranges a meeting at a local church with other mothers whose daughters were taken. They confirm the pattern: one Black girl nearly every summer since 1985. One witness describes seeing both a man and a dog-like creature during an abduction. The mothers insist the killer is human and connected to the police.

Liz and Doug map the woods, marking each disappearance. Doug shows Liz Keisha's autopsy report, which reveals a precise, surgical cut through the sternum. The report was filed by Sydney Oswald, the senior medical examiner, implicating official cover-up. Liz also discovers that a car repeatedly idling outside her mother's house belongs to Lauren Bristol, a former classmate married to Oswald's son Tim.

Liz's friendship with Mel fractures when Liz suggests Mel's father could be the killer, citing his method of field-dressing deer by cutting from sternum to chin to remove the heart. Mel explodes and abandons Liz in the woods on June 21, the summer solstice. Alone, Liz discovers a blue tarp shelter containing entrails mixed with apparent human blood. She is found by a cadaver dog and interrogated by a detective who warns the evidence looks bad.

A mutilated deer, its chest split open and stuffed with bloody popcorn kernels, appears on Marie's dining room table. Liz calls Chris for help. As he loads the carcass into his truck, she spots a crushed pink crayon in the truck bed matching a set she bought Caroline. Marie reveals she has endured years of threatening Ku Klux Klan flyers delivered in bags weighted with popcorn, explaining the hidden popcorn and the security bar.

Doug is fired after running unauthorized DNA tests and tells Liz the blood from both crime scenes matches her DNA, completing a frame job. He claims Tim Oswald carried out the killings and that Lauren moves Caroline through the woods at night. When Chris confirms seeing a white woman with a young Black girl, the group plans a nighttime rescue. Liz reconciles with Mel and recruits her, Garrett, Nick, Chris, and Doug, insisting the official search continue unchanged so the killers are not alerted.

Deep in the woods, Doug discovers Nick carrying a police radio that could expose the operation and alert the killers. The two fight, and Doug severely injures Nick's leg. As the group presses on, Garrett whispers that Chris was the older boyfriend secretly seeing Keisha the night she disappeared at the 2002 bonfire, where Liz hid in a hollow tree. Liz pieces together the evidence against Chris: the blue tarp, the crayon, his intimate knowledge of the trails.

Caroline bursts from the trees alive, saying "Jack" let her go. Doug's wife, Kirsten, emerges and stabs Mel repeatedly. Doug reveals himself as the true killer, the "New Fellow," continuing his father's legacy of targeting successful Black families. His father's resentment crystallized around Liz's mother, a Black doctor who once treated young Doug in the ER, as a symbol of what his family lost when the steel mill closed. Liz was always the intended target at the 2002 bonfire; Keisha was taken by mistake. Doug strangles Liz.

The novel's supernatural thread culminates. The Jackal, called Jack, is a shadow-being awakened during the catastrophic 1889 Johnstown Flood, a dam failure that killed thousands. He fed on fear for decades until Doug's father, the original Fellow, discovered him and began offering the hearts of murdered girls in exchange for purpose. Jack embedded a tooth in Liz's arm during the 2002 bonfire, the source of her wrist scar, and spent 15 years growing inside her, intending to use her as a vessel to escape the woods.

As Doug chokes Liz, Jack attacks him and frees her, then offers godhood through merger. Inside his darkness, Liz encounters the spirits of the murdered girls. Keisha explains that Liz was chosen because she suppressed her own pain and hollowed space inside herself, creating the perfect vessel. Liz frees the trapped spirits, then pretends to accept Jack, drawing him fully into her body. She allows Doug to stab her in the chest, forcing Jack to restore her heart and expel his tooth to keep her alive. Whole again, Liz tears out Jack's heart, destroying him.

Doug and Kirsten are arrested on charges including kidnapping and murder as cold cases reopen. Mel dies from her stab wounds; her funeral draws the media attention Caroline's disappearance never received, because Mel was white. Caroline names 31 murdered girls whose stories Jack told her, giving investigators a comprehensive victim list. Liz delivers Mel's eulogy. She has stopped drinking. Caroline clings to her, drawing pictures with a canine silhouette hidden in the darkness. Liz does not know whether she will stay in Johnstown or return to New York. In the final scene, she sits alone at dusk, picks up a pink crayon, sees a shadow at the edge of her vision, turns, and faces it.