The Serpent Club is told noir-style in the first person, present tense, by Ted Lowe, a reporter for a large Los Angeles newspaper whose life and career begin to unravel when he covers the slaying of a 13-year-old girl.
As Ted unearths the details of the girl's death, he becomes obsessed with both the crime and the violence surrounding it, descending into a moral pit he may be unable to escape. Through it all he stays one step ahead of the authorities, perhaps because nobody else wants the case to be solved - especially when his stories implicate the handsome teenage son of one of California's most powerful men.
