When Madeleine d'Leon conjures a character, Ned McGinnity, as the hero in her next novel she begins to imagine his life. He, too, is an author. Ned is in love with a woman, Willow, who's married to a man Ned loathes, and who loathes him, but he and Willow stay close friends. She's an artist. As Madeleine develops the plot, Ned attends a gallery show where a scummy critic is murdered.
Still stressed from several miscarriages and grieving her inability to have a child, Madeleine grows more and more enamored of Ned, spending more and more time with him and the progress of the investigation and less with her physician husband, Hugh, who in turn may be developing secrets of his own.
As Madeleine engages more with Ned, he begins to engage back. A crisis comes when Madeleine chooses the killer in Ned's story and Hugh begins to question her immersion in her novel.
