When Captain Heimrich and Susan Faye walked into the scene, beautiful actress Peggy Belford was stretched across the floor, a bullet through her chest. Across the room, slumped in a chair is the corpse of Brian Collins, the master of the house. A gun lies on the floor beneath his limp hand. It looks like an open-and-shut case of murder/suicide, yet something about the scene looks phony to Heimrich. He begins an investigation that takes him to the set of the movie Peggy was making before her demise. Since most of these people do their best acting in real life, it's a tough case for Heimrich and Faye, and they had better solve it before another murder/suicide — theirs — is staged.