Jennifer Phillips, an 18-year-old coed, is with her journalism professor the evening he is murdered in a restaurant parking lot. Jennifer has been seduced by her professor in order to obtain information harmful to her father, a local politician who fears that secrets of his private life, involving perversion and other crimes, may get into the hands of an unscrupulous newspaper writer. Detective Sergeant Randa Sorel, a Florida deputy sheriff, has to fight the political influence of Jennifer's father in order to solve the murder and rescue Jennifer from a dysfunctional family. In the course of the investigation Randa discovers a love of her own.