As a photojournalist, Bess Grady is far more comfortable viewing life through her camera lens than firsthand; the extra distance makes it easier to accept life's atrocities. Still recovering from an assignment on which she witnessed the massacre of an entire Croatian orphanage, Bess accepts an easy assignment from a travel magazine to photograph a small village in Mexico and brings her sister along for fun. What awaits her is worse than she ever could have imagined: everyone in the village has been killed by a deadly poison. After rescuing the only survivor, Bess and her sister split up. Bess finds herself captured by the villain who seems to have plotted the horrible destruction. Her sister has disappeared, and the only hope Bess has to save her is to trust a man she believes to be a murderer.