Foster’s Sandman Shop has just what Mark Simmons needs to get the good night’s sleep he craves. What he doesn’t know is that his purchase of a white noise machine is the beginning of his conversion into a “unit.†Using hypnosis and mind-control techniques, Kenneth Foster, the owner of the Sandman Shop, conditions Mark to become a puppet anxious to satisfy his owner’s every need—business, domestic, and sexual—and then sells him into a life of slavery.
The rundown façade of Foster’s Sandman Shop hides more than a lucrative trade in highly skilled “personal assistants,†however. Kenneth Foster has grown impatient with the slow pace of hypnosis and has turned to mind-control drugs. But this pursuit is endangered when the man he hires to conduct tests of the drugs commits a sadistic murder. In the search for the murderer, NYPD Lieutenant Matt Dell’uomo and his team of detectives stumble across Foster’s ambitious plans.
For Dell’uomo, the case becomes more than a quest to solve a crime. His encounters with two of Foster’s employees, Jeff Ange and Michael Sorenson, awaken desires that he has long suppressed.