In this much-anticipated sequel to the award-winning Matinicus, five longtime friends—briefly freed from their complex lives for an annual, all-female retreat on Adria Jackman's remote, 200-acre enclave of Mistake Island, Maine—are forced to put the partying on hold to host the hard-drinking, bachelor botanist, Gil Hodges, stranded there for what could be days.

A hopeless womanizer, Gill is secretly pleased at the layover, but soon finds Mistake's deeply forested interior deceptively bucolic and the women a bit too intriguing for comfort, stirring both glorious memory and profound regret. When a ruthless, diabolical stranger appears out of nowhere, insinuating himself into the fold and bent on a twisted kind of revenge, it falls to Gil to keep the women safe, despite their dawning awareness that not everyone will make it off the island alive.