How do you make sure a crime that hasn't happened yet, never does? That's the problem facing Odd Thomas, the young man with a unique ability to commune with restless spirits and help them find justice and peace. But this time, it's the living who need Odd. Three innocents will be brutally executed unless Odd can intervene, but who the potential victims are remains a mystery. The only thing Odd knows for sure is who the killer will be: a stranger who tried to shoot him dead in a parking lot. With the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock and a network of unlikely allies helping, Odd embarks on an interstate game of cat and mouse with his sinister quarry.