Plot summary
Jack Tagger Jr., an obituary writer for the South Florida Union-Register, becomes intrigued upon seeing a death notice for James Bradley Stomarti, a.k.a. Jimmy Stoma, the front man for the rock band Jimmy and the Slut Puppies. Jack interviews Jimmy's widow, pop singer Cleo Rio, who claims that he died in a diving accident and plugs her upcoming album Shipwrecked Heart, the title song of which she wrote with Jimmy. However, after the obituary is printed, Jimmy's sister Janet tells him Cleo lied: Jimmy was working on his own comeback album. Jack becomes suspicious when he sees Jimmy's body in a funeral home and finds that no autopsy was performed. However, the body is cremated before he can call for one.
Jack was an investigative reporter until he was demoted for publicly insulting the newspaper's publisher, Race Maggad III. His job of writing obituaries has made him become morbidly obsessed with death, especially his own. He obsesses about people who died at his age, and about the fate of his deceased father Jack Tagger Sr., who disappeared when Jack was young. Jack's mother refuses to say when he died, and Jack is paranoid about not living as long as his father did. These obsessions cost him his favorite girlfriend, Anne.
Despite the refusal by Jack's editor, Emma, to let him investigate Jimmy's death, he continues regardless. Parked outside Cleo's condominium one night, he sees her with a young male lover. Emma relents and gives Jack a week to investigate. Jack tracks down Jay Burns, the Slut Puppies' old keyboardist, and knows he is lying about something. Later that night, a burglar breaks into Jack's apartment and attacks him with the frozen corpse of a dead Savannah Monitor lizard kept in his freezer. Jack is beaten unconscious, but the burglar disappears. A few hours later, two police detectives show up and tell him Jay has been murdered.
With his apartment trashed, Jack stays with Emma. When the two search Jay's boat, an external hard drive is found beneath the false bottom of a scuba tank. Meanwhile, Jack is depressed to hear from Carla Candilla, Anne's teenaged daughter, that Anne is marrying a spy novelist. Meeting her at a club, he catches sight of Cleo's boyfriend, a man who calls himself "Loreal" and claims to be a record producer. Jack and Emma are alarmed when Janet disappears; Jack finds a small patch of blood on her carpet. With the help of Jack's friend, sportswriter Juan Rodriguez, Jack decrypts the hard drive and finds it contains master recordings for Jimmy's unfinished album. Listening to it, Jack is still baffled in looking for a motive for Jimmy's presumed murder.
To Jack's surprise, Emma spends the night with him at his apartment. A few days later, she excitedly tells him that Jimmy's bassist, Tito Negroponte, survived an attempted murder in Los Angeles. Jack flies there and interviews Tito, who puts his finger on why Cleo killed Jimmy: she wanted a song from his album, titled "Shipwrecked Heart", for herself. Jack listens to the song, telling Emma that Cleo is desperate to put out another successful song before she fades from the scene, and believes Jimmy's song was better than anything she could write. Still, Jack admits that he cannot prove that Cleo killed Jimmy.
Cleo's bodyguard kidnaps Emma, and she demands the master in exchange for her. At Lake Okeechobee, Jack and Juan meet the bodyguard and Loreal, trading the master for Emma. The bodyguard tries to kill all of them but ends up upending the airboat he is driving, with fatal results for himself and Loreal. On Jack's 47th birthday the next day, his mother sends him a card and an obituary revealing that Jack Sr. died at age 46. He feels relieved to have lived longer than his father. Janet resurfaces, having fled Cleo's goons, and admits that she switched the tags on a pair of coffins at the funeral home, meaning Jimmy was actually buried in the wrong man's grave. At her request, the body is exhumed and a pathologist finds that Jimmy was drugged before he drowned. Cleo is convicted of murder; Jack sails back onto the front page covering the story while Jimmy's posthumous album is a success.
A subplot focuses on Jack's ongoing conflict with Maggad, and the ailing state of the Union-Register under Maggad's control. Jack finds an ally in MacArthur Polk, the newspaper's former publisher, who owns a large number of shares in Maggad's company. Maggad is desperate to buy the shares back before two foreign companies initiate a hostile takeover. Polk dies and names Jack as trustee of his shares, with instructions that Maggad can have the stock back only if he sells the Union-Register back to Polk's widow Ellen. After Maggad reluctantly agrees, Ellen reverses Maggad's practices. Emma is promoted, and the novel ends as she is trying to talk Jack back from his leave of absence from journalism.
