Sam Truman is a disgraced and unlicensed former private investigator without a proverbial pot to piss in. During a morning mission to scrape up enough bread to pay his rent at the flophouse, Sam intervenes in an attempted robbery and ends up shooting the robber to death with a gun he isn’t legally permitted to possess. In the aftermath of the shooting, Sam is visited by the bloody corpse of the dead robber, which is now being inhabited by the spirit of a murdered woman who charges Sam with the task of solving her murder. Now Sam is up to his neck in a dark underworld of walking corpses, black magic, and Hell’s own army, and all because he agreed to a dead woman’s plea to “Catch my killer!”

Sam is hired by a man whose extramarital dalliance has resulted in a lot more than he bargained for when the girl in question deposits something horrible inside his body and then promptly dies. Now Sam finds himself chasing the dead girl’s doppelganger all over the City, from seedy bars to the city morgue, in an effort to discover what she is and how he can stop her before she can spread her bizarre brand of lovemaking to another poor sap!

When a mysterious woman hires Sam Truman to find both her brother and a family heirloom known as The Pale Man, Sam is grateful for the money. So grateful, in fact, that he’s willing to enter The Phillips-Rogers Project, a tenement known for its hellish conditions and abundant crime, in order to find them. What he finds inside The PR, however, is something horrible and not of this world. Nightmares wait inside The Phillips-Rogers Project, and The Pale Man holds the key.