One rain-lashing night, Melanie Truslow's father--a former French officer in Vietnam--fell off the McClenny Pier near his North Florida home and was drowned. Now his large house, and its ghosts, are hers. As she begins to settle into her new surroundings, she tries to understand the accident of his death and to reconstruct the life of the man who had left her mother before Melanie was born. Her only clues lie within the house's filthy basement--a room with blacked-out windows, chicken bones and cigarette butts strewn on the floor, and stacks of homemade pornographic videos narrated by a scarred and cynical French journalist.