Chloe Magnuson's reign of terror in Manhattan seemed to have ended when her brutally strangled remains along with a personal journal are delivered to the Midtown morgue. Assigned the post mortem Dr. Candice Torres is embarassed by her susceptibility to tabloid sensationalism; lurid stories describing Magnuson as a vicious predator that rose to notorious heights of infamy for her slashing attacks with a straight razor. Fearing the body might yet conceal lethal defenses Torres is hesitant to begin the autopsy; decides instead to delay the procedure and satisfy her curiosity with a brief browse through the journal. Once absorbed in the compelling script she is unaware of time passing as night engulfs her in a dark chronicle of psychotic carnage that extended from the plush quarters of Manhattan's exclusive townhouses to its subterranean maze of shadowed tunnels beneath the streets. A contest ensued between the restraints of civilized society and unfettered savagery as Chloe sought to achieve some ambiguous erotic catharsis in reckless acts of abduction and murder; abandoned her respectable cover as a research scientist and mutated from one disguised identity to another in a frenzied effort to evade the closing web of a police dragnet. Her desperate plight provokes a mysterious evolution of empathy in Candice who caught up in the rationales Chloe used to justify her rampage begins to perceive the hunted psychopath as an icon of defiant feminism. Was Magnuson as she claimed truly the product of an insane world, and what gruesome implications arise out of the pathologist's growing esteem for her ruthlessness? The body lays inert in a small island of light as Candice reads of a final plot to lure Chloe to her destruction, all the gathered malice of her victims coalescing into one bitter reach of hands incensed by the need to squeeze the last breath from her throat. But the indomitable murderess harbors secrets that only become apparent when Candice closes the journal and slips from all the ethical anchors of her life toward an abyss of evil deeper than words can express.