Victoria McPherson is a brilliant young FBI agent who's investigating a serial murder case. The body count is now at five and she has no real leads, nothing but a mountain of circumstantial evidence and a boss who's breathing down her neck.

In order to take a break from it all, she decides to visit her father in the suburbs. Since it's close to the Christmas holidays, she and her father talk about their family, including Victoria's grandfather, who used to be a private investigator. This discussion leads Victoria to read one of her grandfather's old case files, a file which reveals an uncomfortably high number of similarities between a seventy-five year old case in Europe and the current string of killings in Chicago...