Porter Wren (Adrien Brody) writes a daily column about murder and tragedy for a New York City newspaper. He's good at solving mysteries — he once found a missing little girl. At home he's a model family man, devoted to his loving wife Lisa (Jennifer Beals) and young children.
A seductive stranger named Caroline Crowley (Yvonne Strahovski) asks him to dig into the unsolved murder of her filmmaker husband, Simon Crowley. Simon's body was found in the rubble of a demolished building, but the police have no clue how he got into the locked building. Porter accepts the challenge but soon finds that he's been drawn into a very nasty case of sexual obsession and blackmail - especially after his house is broken into and his young son is shot.