A teenage girl, naked and badly injured, is discovered by two fisherman in mountain forest in Macabee County, Oregon. Before lapsing into a coma, she asks for someone called Billy, and dies before reaching hospital. The dead girl is identified as Edie Collier, last known to be living on the streets of Portland after quarrelling with her mother. That's how Summer Zeigler, a newly qualified detective in the Portland Police Bureau, gets involved: she arrested Edie for shoplifting six months before. Then the body of Edie's boyfriend, Billy, turns up in the Nevada desert. His manner of death, a wound caused by a crossbow bolt and the removal of his heart and eyes, links him to several other murders. Summer's investigations will lead her to the strange mansion of software millionaire Dirk Merritt, who made his fortune from a computer role-playing game called Trans. But cyberspace is no longer enough to fulfil Merritt's fantasies as it once did. Now he wants to play a real-life version of his game. A game with deadly consequences.