A Tragic Compulsion is about the ordeals of Rhino, a young Nigerian of poor family background who wants to keep an honor to his family's name by avoiding criminal activities as he struggles in Spain to meet up with the financial pressures coming from home. But when Rhino receives a phone call one early morning and is informed that his best friend Sappy, who travelled to Europe a year after he did, is back to Nigeria for the Christmas and now very rich, he panics and begins to reconsider his moral stance. There are now two voices battling within him. One wants him to turn to crime to make money if he really wants to relieve his family. The other is urging him to maintain his honorability, meaning, his family keeps suffering in poverty.

Rhino understands that what made Sappy become rich is drug trading, but he is still putting resistance to the voice compelling him to go into the business. Yet what would heighten his problems is that he doesn’t know that the small tip he is receiving from a regular client of the hotel where he works is a little piece of blackmail. When he is finally trapped, the stranger still offers him a huge sum of money for a little conspiracy. A twenty thousand Euros upfront plunges Rhino into sudden wealth syndrome. It is only when he comes back to where he lives after executing the unknown client's job in the hotel and finds his three roommates dead and swelling that he understands that a stranger has singled him out as machinery for murder.