Tommy Train, National Television Network star, presided over the story meeting. He was shirtless, a terry towel draped over his tan shoulders. "C'mon folks, let's roll," he prodded. "Hit the switch. Where are the new ideas?" Tommy lifted the hand mirror from his desk as his staff threw out angles: organ transplants, serial killers on execution row, masturbation, Elvis exhumed…. Tommy leaped to his feet abruptly. "Downmarket, think downmarket! JC multiplied loaves and fishes for the masses. We've got to stage a magic show!"

Jack Werts, veteran reporter for Newsmakers magazine and the print equivalent of Tommy Train, knew all about staging magic shows. In the cutthroat news world where gutter journalism fed the public's appetite for celebrity trash, Werts was a boozed-up and burnt-out king-weary of the endless rat-race. When the news broke of Doni Shay's kidnapping, he wasn't thrilled about an off-season visit to East Hampton, Long Island's celebrity resort; but the Shay story was worldwide and hot.

At a chic Hamptons bar, Werts gets the facts. The three-year-old son of Robert Shay, the fabulously wealthy movie mogul, has been kidnapped right off their private beach. Shay, on location in the jungles of Thailand, is flying back into a media feeding frenzy, the crime of the decade…a wealthy, well-known family, their little son at the mercy of a kidnapper.

In Los Angeles, talk-show idol Tommy Train sees the Shay story as his ticket to big Nielsen numbers. He sends voluptuous blond reporter Ceci McCann into the East Hampton fray, where she lets Jack Werts talk his way into her hotel room-and he lets her steal his "best" leads. Ceci skyrockets to fame as Train grabs sensational, nationwide coverage of the kidnapping; Robert Shay quietly arranges the sale of his assets for ransom money; the kidnappers continue to execute a brilliant plan; while Jack Werts pursues the real story, trusting the gut instincts that have served him so well in the past to uncover the outrageous, astonishing truth…