Strained to the limits of his hard-won sobriety when his daughter runs away to join the theater, Beaumont pursues her to a Shakespeare Festival where two stars are murdered. Beau uncovers a real-life revenge play whose twisted director will stop at nothing to make sure the last body falls on cue.

Shakespearean scholar Kate Stanley and Ben Pearl, her partner in crime-solving, find themselves in a desperate race to discover a lost version of "Macbeth," said to contain rituals of witchcraft aimed at conjuring demonic forces to gain forbidden knowledge. However much Kate would like to dismiss such rituals as superstition, someone else appears willing to kill for them--and for the manuscript said to spell them out.