One cold winter's morning, Lorimer Black - insurance adjuster, young, good-looking, on the rise - goes out on a perfectly ordinary business appointment, finds a hanged man and realizes that his life is about to be turned upside down.

The elements at play: a beautiful actress glimpsed in a passing taxi . . . an odd new business associate whose hiring, firing and rehiring make little sense . . . a rock musician who is losing his mind - and a web of fraud in which virtually everyone Lorimer Black knows has been caught and in which he finds himself increasingly entangled.