The first in a three-part urban fantasy murder mystery series, Alise Campbell is a title secretary in Houston, Texas with as little drama in her life as possible. Having decided long ago that watching the news was not helpful to her personally, she has been blissfully unaware that a serial killer is on the loose in her hometown. As the body count mounts, the news intrudes into Alise's world from several directions at once, including lucid dreams. Alise is initially hesitant and more than a bit disbelieving that some kind of magical device can help the police catch the killer, but she decides to give it a try. In a process similar to "psychic questing," and combining quantum physics with metaphysics and the latest in DNA memory research, Alise grows in her own knowledge of the arcane through trial and error while others join her on her mission to see the face of a killer in a hologram.