Daisy Lowendahl is a best-selling suspense novelist who finds herself at her isolated beach house with a local young fan who knows almost everything about her, and two men — one of whom may be trying to kill her, the other of whom could save her life, causing Daisy to be thrown into the middle of a real-life drama.

A newspaper photographer, Jean, researches the lurid and sensational axe murder of two women in 1873 as an editorial tie-in with a brutal modern double murder. She discovers a cache of papers that appear to give an account of the murders by an eyewitness.