Vanessa, a pop culture writer in NYC, lands the interview of a lifetime with renowned mystery author Martin Clayborne. It's a rocky start, but as they spend more time together she learns there is much more to him than meets the eye.

It's the 1980s. Brother and sister Christopher Jr. and Cathy Dollanganger, a surgeon and ballet teacher respectively, are the product of an incestuous but loving relationship between their married parents, who were half-uncle to niece. Chris and Cathy are now married to each other, and live under the last name Sheffield, the surname of who ended up being their adoptive father. They managed to escape from their mother, born Corrine Foxworth, who once tried to kill them so that she could inherit...