The faces of twenty-five men and women were visible immediately the half-minute of film-faces stunned with the beggining horror of the unprecedented event they were witnessing. Now, twenty-one of the twenty-five were dead, dying one by one in order of their appearance on the reel. To save themselves, the four survivors mist find out why. There is strong evidence of an act of conscious corruption in each of the clues. A near-murder on a lonely troutstream, a genteel retired farmer turned homicidal sociopath, and a spiraling series of coincidences add up to an almost incredible conspiracy-one that finds it in its own interest to prove the existence of an imaginary series of conspiracies, and to mine, the broken hope and despair of our times for an ugly domination of our thoughts and lives.