Plot

A podcast host becomes interested in a cold-case disappearance, mostly because she and the victim had grown up together in their small town.

Alex McPherson returns to the small Pennsylvania town where she spent her childhood summers to record the next episode of her true-crime podcast about the disappearance of a childhood friend 20 years ago. But after teaming up with the local newspaper editor, who reluctantly agrees to help her retrace the girl's last steps, Alex uncovers not only the shocking truth behind the girl's disappearance, but also a decades-old murder and its cover-up.

Former business consultant Alex McPherson left that work to spend time with her ailing mother, helping her fulfill her bucket list at this, the end of her life. Stemming from that time, Alex started a podcast called Recovered in helping a friend of her mother locate her missing daughter, the podcast broadcasting information in hopes of assistance from the public. With the successful outcome of that story and her mother now having passed, Alex has decided to continue the podcast for a second story, one more personal to herself: the twenty year cold case of Gina DeSavio, Alex's childhood friend from Harrington, Pennsylvania where Alex spent many summers growing up. The day Gina went missing, she was working her regular shift in the dining room at the Harrington Country Club where a special event was taking place. After Gina left work, her car was found wrecked on a boulder in a wooded area. With some of Gina's blood on the windshield and no sign of Gina, the official story is that Gina died, probably by falling off the nearby cliff in the ravine into the raging river below, with her body never recovered. From what she knows of the case not having been in Harrington that year, Alex believes that Gina may still be alive. Needing access to background information, Alex heads to the local newspaper, the Harrington Chronicle, to search through their archives. With the request made through the paper's editor-in-chief Drew Godfrey, formerly a crime reporter in Philadelphia, Miles Lewiston, the paper's managing editor and publisher, wants Drew and the staff to provide Alex assistance and whatever else she needs in return for exclusive rights to her podcast for this story in Lewiston knowing it will be of great local interest. The staff are happy to oblige if only because they believe their jobs are on the line, something unspoken with Lewiston which makes them think that he may be thinking about folding the newspaper. While Drew becomes equally as ensconced in the story not having known anything about it before Alex's arrival, it does not stop Alex and Drew from having differing opinions on what threads are best to follow, some which are more dangerous than others. However, they agree that one of Gina's wait staff colleagues at the country club that night, Courtney Jeffers, now a tax accountant and lawyer in town, may know more about the story than she has told the authorities.—Huggo