Sixteen year old Kate Beckett is engaging in a summer vacation romance with Tommy Ibarra, a local boy who her father does not approve of. After promising faithfully to not see Tommy again, she is left one night to babysit her younger brother Michael. Tommy comes over to see her; and he and Kate sneak outside to neck. Michael is in Kate's bedroom playing video games; where he is abducted and later found murdered. After killing Michael, the kidnapper commits suicide. The horror tears Kate's family apart; and the ensuing guilt over not watching her brother as promised tragically ends the summer romance.

Fourteen years later, Kate is an experienced child kidnapping expert, and a children's advocate. She has been called back to the small vacation retreat where Michael died to investigate the abduction of another youth named Tricia. Having not been there since her brother's death, being in the small community again opens old wounds and guilt. Kate desperately wants to find Tricia alive, and time is of the utmost importance. An old friend from Kate's teen years, John Burkhart, has put up a very large reward for information leading to Tricia's return; and the deputy in charge of the case is CJ, also an old friend. CJ brings in a Security and Communication Specialist to aid in the investigation, who just happens to be Kate's old flame Tommy Ibarra. Tommy has never forgiven Kate for acceding to her family's wishes to dump him; and the fact that her rich and powerful father tried to ruin Tommy's future.

The case is eerily similar to another set of serial kidnapping and murder cases, one which had been closed when the supposed kidnapper committed suicide. As Kate and Tommy investigate the kidnapping of Tricia, they are tentative and distant. There has been a lot of pain in their past together, and they are not completely comfortable with each other. After spending so much time together, however, the walls come down and the passion between them explodes. It soon becomes apparent in their investigations that both the new kidnapping and the old cases tie into Michael's disappearance and murder. The race is on to find Tricia before she is murdered, and to figure out the correlation between these cases, and why they seem to have a peculiar connection to Kate herself.

GUILTY AS SIN is a very interesting and intriguing kidnapping/murder investigation; as well as a lovely second chance at love story. Although the story is not tied to Jami Alden's previous series, there are mentions of characters from that series. The book is not listed as the beginning of a new series, but does introduce a number of characters begging for their own story. This is a very good read, recommended to Alden's fans; as well as anyone wishing to read a taut, well written Romantic Suspense story.