A beautiful, mysterious woman sets out to murder a series of men in revenge for some unknown wrong. The novel is split into five sections, one for each of her intended victims. Each section is subdivided into three parts: 1) a glimpse of her casing the men’s residences beforehand, 2) her interposing herself into their lives in some disarming fashion – the first two by dangling the possibility of romance – and attempting to kill them in ways that look like accidents, and 3) the tribulations of homicide detective Lew Wanger as he tries to solve this baffling string of murders and prevent the next one.