Dystopia is – was – the hottest show in the country. Located in a rundown warehouse in Atlantic City, it was participatory theater, a show in which the audience could interact with the actors. The performances, played out in dystopian scenes, featured gruesome violence, lots of blood, and sex. The show was so terrifying that audience members sometimes fainted, thereby adding to its reputation as "must see" theater.
When the COVID pandemic hit, though, social distancing, and limits on crowd size, put a serious strain on the show's finances. In order to get as large an audience as they could, the owners of the show had to increase ticket prices, as well as ramp up the sex and violence contained in the acts. If they didn't keep the popularity of the show high, the offer they had to move Dystopia to New York City and a larger venue might disappear.
When a particularly obnoxious customer and his female companion are murdered in one of the performances, everyone in the audience thought it was all part of the show. But it wasn't. The murders were real.
Detectives in Atlantic City and Atlanta try to solve the murders. Adding to the whodunit mystery is that the couple who were murdered were not man and wife. Detectives have two suspects they focus on immediately. One is the wife of the man who was murdered, the owner of a construction company who is associated with organized crime. The other is the husband of the woman who was murdered, an apparently crooked lawyer who, herself, may have ties to organized crime. The problem the detectives have is that neither of the suspects were anywhere near Atlantic City – they both live in Atlanta.
Eventually a suspect is found, but questions remain – was he really the murderer, and will more murders follow?