The rage room. In the mid 21st century, it has become the most sought out method of destruction therapy. Want to kill your lover and get away with it? What about your boss? Your priest? At Catharsis, Chicago’s premier rage room for the wealthy elite, you now can—in a safe, controlled simulation—and no one gets hurt. No one dies.

Owen Valack is the CEO who runs Catharsis, a corporation built on the backs of his father and grandfather. Now, decades after its inception, a new technology is being pioneered at Catharsis, substituting living, sentient replicants as victims instead of crude, outdated holograms. And Owen, in the midst of a bitter divorce, has decided to use his estranged wife’s replicant as the prototype. But the replicants, unlike the crude holograms that came before, fight back with surprising strength and agility. A shocking discovery is made when the simulated murder of a second replicant coincides with the grisly death of its human counterpart swimming 2,000 miles away at Malibu Beach.

Pete Malinowski, a beat cop, gets a call to respond to a reported drowning. Inexplicably, what he finds is a man clearly dead, but not from drowning. Suspecting a homicide, he begins an investigation that leads him from Malibu Beach to Council Grove, Kansas, and finally back to Chicago to ferret out the truth of what’s really happening behind closed doors at the premier Chicago rage room.