Following the mysterious death of a fellow member of a local Mystery Writers' Workshop, a librarian and struggling mystery novelist named Julia London steals the deceased author's unpublished manuscript and purports it to be her own. Once the novel, entitled "Grave Misconduct", becomes a publishing phenomenon, a series of grisly murders occur that mirror events in the book and eventually implicate Julia herself. Now she must work to discover the identity of the killer while simultaneously protecting herself from being publicly exposed.