Dress rehearsal for the PTA fundraiser is at its chaotic peak when one of the seven identical clowns cavorting on stage pulls out a gun and shoots the director, Corrinne Buldock. Molly Masters, also dressed as a clown, is a stunned and baffled witness to the killing. She wonders: which of her fellow performers, all of them respectable parents and teachers, can conceivably be a murderer?

The rumor is that Corrinne and her old boyfriend split up . . . and that she had just confessed to a sexual involvement with a student. Soon Molly knows more dirty little school secrets than she would care to-and more than enough to send a desperate killer back into action. . .