Paul Sinclair is calm, sane and curious. He and his bright young wife Jane drive down to the south of France in his vintage Jaguar so that she can take up a post as doctor to the new community of Eden-Olympia, just above Cannes.
Multinational companies and their sharpest executives have converged on this high-tech business park, tempted by its location and facilities, by its efficiency and its security, and by something far more disquieting. According to its resident psychologist, Wilder Penrose, Eden-Olympia is 'a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future . . . an ideas laboratory for the new millennium'. In such a place, he claims, one is absolutely free to 'board the escalator of possibility'.
Jane does just that. But Paul hesitates before boarding, pausing to look around. He finds what he sees mystifying and unsettling; when he learns that he and his wife have been housed in a villa whose previous occupant had been driven to massacre notable executives on a horrific shooting spree, he begins to look under the surface of his new surroundings. For all the dawn-to-dusk hard work being done, for all its productivity and profits, Eden-Olympia is the venue for games of the most serious sort. So Paul joins in.