Death is everywhere on the old Venice pier, once Hollywood's playground. "Goodbye" reads the crumbling movie marquee. The roller coaster lies broken in the sand, a decaying dinosaur. In a sunken circus in the scum-filled canal, a dead man peers from the lion's cage. Another body turns up at a local flaphouse. While others view these deaths as merely a symptom of a dying town, a crusty detective and a young writer suspect murder and come to stalk a killer as elusive as the fog enveloping the waterfront, as insubstantial as a voice in the night whispering "Death is a lonely business...".