Will you kill for a good story? If you are James Cooper, a 28 year old copy editor with dreams of literary stardom, you will. After all, your girlfriend was just crowned the "voice of a new America" by the New York literati, and you waste your days editing third-rate textbooks in a dreary Chicago basement. Your first book got panned. Your agent just dumped you. You have no future. But when your girlfriend's corpse ends up sprawled beneath your bedroom window, you finally know what to write about...