A memoir in which Stephen Elliot discusses the state of his own life in the spring of 2007, during which he was suffering from writer's block and drug addiction, and tells how he was pulled out of his funk and set on a path of self-discovery by his interest in the case of Hans Reiser, a computer programmer accused of killing his estranged wife, and Hans's former best friend Sean Sturgeon, who confessed to eight unrelated murders.