Karen O'Connor tells the story about two distinct but related periods in her life. In 1972, she is an up-and-coming Los Angeles based journalist who has been given the lucrative assignment of convincing once successful comic Vince Collins, who is at the tail end of his career, to allow her to ghost write his memoirs. Most specifically, she has the task from her publishers of discovering the reason behind two issues in Vince's life from 1957: why he and his former on-stage partner Lanny Morris, who is still active and well known within the entertainment business, broke up their professional partnership shortly after they hosted a successful thirty-nine hour telethon for polio research in Miami, there not having been any indication of problems between the two before that; and how did the dead body of Maureen O'Flaherty end up in the water filled bathtub in Vince and Lanny's New Jersey hotel suite, the opening of that New Jersey hotel owned by mobster Sally Sanmarco which was Lanny and Vince's next gig after the telethon. Maureen, a college student, was working part-time as a room service waitress at the Miami Versailles Hotel where Vince and Lanny were staying during the telethon, she who had served the pair at the time. The last she was known to be seen was by the Miami hotel staff when Lanny and Vince were still staying there three days before the discovery of her body, with the official cause of death being accidental drowning as she had narcotics in her system. Neither Lanny or Vince was ever implicated in having anything to do with Maureen's death or even how she got from Miami to New Jersey coinciding with their own travels. Despite there perhaps being more well known writers who could do the job, the publishing company chose Karen as, known or unknown to Vince, she was the Miracle Child, a polio survivor who appeared on the 1957 telethon. During her research, Karen is unable to meet with Lanny, who, through his legal representatives, tells her that he is writing his own explosive tell-all book which will make her project meaningless. In Karen's search for the truth, things get complicated when she starts receiving from an anonymous source upcoming chapters from Lanny's memoirs which may purely be to throw her off the track from reality, and when she meets Lanny in the flesh, she not divulging to him who she really is.