Opera: a lavish form of musical entertainment that for over 400 years has been seen by different observers as intimidating, lofty, ridiculous, mysterious, glamorous, gripping, boring, and otherworldly. It is also the most gender-fluid of the arts, featuring (in its earliest days) male singers who had been castrated as boys to preserve their high voices, and continuing to the present, when women still don trousers to portray men on stage.

To Jeremy Blatz it is a fascinating distraction from an unfulfilled life marred by the frustrations of an unrewarding job as a second-string music critic and a marriage that seems to be dissolving before his eyes. But it is not until his sleep is routinely interrupted by asthma attacks that he finally seeks treatment from a hypnotherapist who, to Jeremy's delight, also has connections to the backstage world of the local opera company.

But what begins as an intriguing artistic exploration becomes a sinister obsession as Jeremy witnesses a series of acclaimed sopranos suffer bizarrely grotesque deaths after their association with the opera world's greatest male sex-symbol, the Egyptian-American bass/baritone Ramzi Matthews. It is through the intercession of his hypnotherapist that Jeremy becomes friends with Ramzi even as his own hypnosis sessions become infused with shocking, trance-induced visions of Satanic rituals, sexual abuse, and human sacrifice—all colored by the residual religious guilt that engulfs Jeremy from his childhood Catholic upbringing.

Jeremy eventually becomes determined to save his favorite singer, a uniquely gifted soprano named Vanessa Williams—who coincidentally is also undergoing hypnosis treatments from the same therapist—from meeting a similarly morbid fate by using his investigative skills to unravel the intricately woven threads of her less fortunate colleagues' lives. The shocking truth he ultimately uncovers changes his life forever.