A glamorous birthday dinner in the Hollywood Hills ends with the famous host dead and every guest under suspicion.
When actress Elspeth Bell attends the fiftieth birthday party of her ex-husband Richard Bryant, the Hollywood director who launched her career, all she wants is to pass unnoticed through the glamorous crowd in his sprawling Los Angeles mansion. Instead, there are just seven other guests, and Richard's pet octopus, Persephone, watching over them from her tank as the intimate party grows more surreal, and rowdy, by the hour. Come morning, Richard is dead, and all of the guests are suspects.
In the weeks that follow, each of the guests comes under suspicion: the school friend, the studio producer, the actress, the actor, the new partner, the manager, the cinematographer, and even Elspeth herself. What starts as a locked-room mystery soon reveals itself to be much more complicated, as dark stories from Richard's past surface, colliding with Elspeth's memories of their marriage that she vowed never to revisit. Elspeth begins to wonder not just who killed Richard, but why these eight guests were invited, and what sort of man would desire to possess a creature as mysterious and unsettling as Persephone.
