Jack B. Nife is a children's author whose happy marriage has been destroyed by his obsession with his unpublished first book, Harold the Hedgehog. He is working on a series of manuscripts titled Decades of Death, about Victorian era serial killers. He has become obsessed with serial killers and paranoid that people are watching him and trying to kill him, which isn't helped by the fact that a serial killer called the Hanoi Handshake Killer, who cuts off the fingers of his victims, has been active in his neighbourhood.
