Alfonso Stephen O'Kelly' is a brilliant but penniless young composer living in New York after World War Two. Irresistibly handsome, he hastily marries heiress Sylvia Triumphington, but is unable to keep his infidelities secret. Sylvia moves out, though not before introducing him to her gorgeous adoptive mother. But Stephen's life is about to take a darker turn, and death lurks just beneath the glittering, glamorous surface of the New York scene...