When celebrity biographer Randall Capri writes a lurid and unauthorized bio of the late Rod Preston, a virile movie star of the fifties and sixties, it sets in motion a deadly chain of events. Preston's naive daughter, Charlotte, hires Benjamin Justice to turn the tables on Capri by ghost writing an expose of him, while salvaging her father's good name. After finding Charlotte dead, an apparent suicide, Justice begins to have his doubts about how she died. Working with reporter Alexandra Templeton, his investigation takes him from the wealthy hillside enclaves of Montecito to the gay bars of Tijuana as he searches for the truth. While Justice copes with a life-threatening health crisis and struggles to clear himself of suspicion, his search for the killer propels him behind the locked gates of a mysterious compound in the remote California desert-- and to evidence of evil beyond imagination.