Quentin Coldwater`s life is changed forever by an apparently chance encounter: when he turns up for his entrance interview to Princeton he finds his interviewer dead - but a strange envelope bearing Quentin`s name leads him down a very different path to any he`d ever imagined. The envelope, and the mysterious manuscript it contains, leads to a secret world of obsession and privilege, a world of freedom and power and, for a while, it`s a world that seems to answer all Quentin`s desires. But the idyll cannot last - and when it`s finally shattered, Quentin is drawn into something darker and far more dangerous than anything he could ever have expected ...