When Max Cady, a feral ex-con, is released from a fourteen-year prison sentence, he tracks down Sam Bowden—the idealistic public defender who failed to keep him out of jail. Rather than attack Sam directly, Cady wages a campaign of psychological terror against his family: poisoning their dog, brutalizing Sam's colleague, and approaching his sixteen-year-old daughter under the guise of her summer school teacher. As the local police prove powerless and a hired private detective is murdered, Sam discovers that the legal system he's devoted his life to cannot protect what he loves. Forced to abandon every principle he's built his identity around, he takes his wife and daughter to a houseboat on the Cape Fear River, where the family must confront Cady alone—and discover what each of them is capable of when everything is at stake.
