20 year old Deborah Dearborn has just written a best selling novel about a cold and calculating woman who bears a strong resemblance to her boyfriend's stepmother. Now Deborah is living at a beach house in Malibu and in the process of selling the rights to her book to a movie producer. Then the stepmother, Stephanie Carew, appears on the scene threatening to sue for libel. This throws a monkey wrench into the movie but when Stephanie's dead body is found floating in a swimming pool everyone assumes the death is accidental and champagne corks begin popping all-around because the blockbuster movie can proceed. Hold everything, says the coroner. His autopsy shows that Stephanie did not die in the swimming pool but in the ocean and that the cause of death was a blow on the head not drowning. Poor, little Deborah is charged with the crime.