A famous crime novelist's protigie disappears before the release of author's first new book in years. Is the seeming crime an elaborate publicity stunt, or was this author so desperate for material that he created his own sinister inspiration? Despite his cunning defense on trial (the trial that made his book a best seller), Detective Cooper suspects the latter. She's determined to separate fiction from reality, but the deeper she gets in the story, the more twisted the plot becomes.

With a torrid past that haunts him, a movie theatre owner is hired to search for the only existing print of a film so notorious that its single screening caused the viewers to become homicidally insane.