Shimmering blonde hair framing an exquisite pale face. Deep green eyes, a generous mouth. Matthew Hope took one look and fell instantly in love. Sarah Whittaker had everything: stunning good looks, youth, money, social standing. Everything, that is, but her freedom. Because Sarah Whittaker was currently residing, against her inclinations and her will, in Knott’s Retreat — familiarly known to the residents of Florida’s booming West Coast as Nut’s Retreat. In the State of Florida, County of Calusa, Sarah Whittaker was a certified paranoid schizophrenic. That’s what the doctors said. It’s what her widowed mother said. It’s what the court-ordered psychiatric commitment papers said. It was not what Sarah Whittaker said — and that was why she had called Matthew Hope. Would he, she asked, act as her attorney and fight for her freedom — not to mention fighting for the $650,000 left her by her father and now controlled by her mother. Hope might have lost his heart, but he hadn’t lost his wits. He probed Sarah’s story of a mother driven by hate to confine her only child to a mental institution and decided she was telling the truth. He took the case. And in so doing was led into a hall of mirrors in which reality and delusion blurred into murder, mutilation, and the greatest danger Hope had ever known