Claire Rodenburg, a young British actress, pays the rent on her New York apartment the only way she can: as a decoy for a detective agency, entrapping straying husbands. When a client is murdered in macabre circumstances, she agrees to help the police entice the dead woman's husband into revealing whether he's the killer. But as Claire gets closer to their quarry, she begins to realize that she's not the only one who's playing a part. And as she pursues the shadowy figure of a serial killer across the Internet and through the dark fantasies of a nineteenth-century poet, she has to immerse herself in her role more deeply than she ever thought possible…