Sometimes the door to the past opens gently—other times, with a terrible bang, and for John Coffin, it is the latter when a package marked with his initials is opened to reveal a woman’s severed arms and legs. Coffin’s own dark suspicion is that the limbs belong to someone with whom he had a brief affair during a rocky time in his marriage. Past ghosts or not, Coffin doggedly pursues the investigation even as an ominous spectre comes back to haunt him. When a second woman is found shot to death in her car, Coffin begins to suspect those closest to his wife, Stella Pinero, a famous actress who still manages to keep her own husband guessing at her secrets. As the Second City police force works to identify the first victim and make a connection to the second, unexpected events lead Coffin to the stunning unraveling of this bizarre crime.