Bart Minnock, founder of the computer gaming giant U-Play, enters his private playroom and assumes the role of a sword-wielding warrior king, in his company's latest top-secret project, Fantastical. The next morning he is found in the same locked room, in a pool of blood, his head separated from his body. NYPSD Lieutenant Eve Dallas is having as much trouble figuring out how Minnock was murdered as who did the murding. Eve and her team are about to enter the next level of police work, in a world where fantasy is the ultimate seduction and the price of defeat is death.