A naked, badly injured teenage girl is discovered by two fishermen in mountainous forest in Oregon -- two hundred miles from her home. She asks for someone called Billy, but tragically lapses into a coma 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 police detective in the Portland Police Bureau gets involved: she arrested Edie for shoplifting six months before.
Then the mutilated corpse 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 investigation leads her to the strange mansion of software millionaire Dirk Merritt, who made his fortune from a computer role-playing game known as Trans. But cyberspace is no longer enough to fulfill Merritt's grotesque fantasies. He wants to play a real-life version of his game. A game with deadly consequences... As Summer unwittingly enters a dead game of cat-and-mouse, will she survive long enough to learn the twisted rules of the game and thwart a ruthless killer before he strikes again?
