In the dead of winter, during a nasty snowstorm, a routine homicide investigation takes a literary twist. A suspected drug dealer is found dead, naked and with what seems to be part of a larger story written all over his body. This is the beginning of the serial killing spree dubbed by the press as the ''The Writer.'' Detectives Sam Burke and Twitch Williams, helped by graphologist Charlotte Garland, have to discover the truth and end the literary nightmare that has descended, like the snow, upon the city.