The dark reaches of Riptide are ignited by Eve and Rene, fast friends, both stunning, both desperate to shed their sordid past and claim freedom. In hot pursuit, the icy, sociopathic madam Edmonda LaBeach, determined to recover all she has lost. Into this whirlpool walks Ray Strand, a reluctant WW2 war hero whose homecoming is shattered by his troubled wife's suicide and his own ensuing life-sentence of guilt.

Hitchhiking into an unknown future, Ray Strand is invited to accompany the fugitive women in their glamorous convertible. He falls hard for Rene, but in this world of shadows, what is real and what is not proves difficult to discern.

In the black and the white, the dark and the light, Ray Strand's quest for salvation plunges him through lust, jealousy, love, deception and murder, bringing him into a life-altering confrontation with the truth. It could be fatal, or lighting the gloom at the end of tunnel, it could be hope.