Best-selling author Sam Bayer is experiencing a creative crisis. For inspiration, he comes to his childhood town of Cranes View, where thirty years ago he found the corpse of “local Mata Hari” Paulina Ostrovaya, nicknamed Hornet’s Nest, in the river, and decides to write a documentary novel about her. The namesake and namesake of the 1940s movie star Veronica Lake, who bears an uncanny resemblance to both her prototype and Hornet's Nest, comes into his bed and as his assistant. Meanwhile, the corpses around begin to multiply at an alarming rate, casting doubt on the official version of long-standing events...