Joe Panther is a man with many secrets. Dangerous secrets. He is a drug dealer. He is a killer. He is a private investigator. Above all, he is the Messiah, fallen on hard times. When a young woman is found crucified and decapitated in a Melbourne inner-city church, the police suspect the local priest, a man with dark secrets of his own. The priest hires Panther to clear his name.
Soon Panther becomes both the hunter and the hunted. Nothing is as it seems - not even, perhaps, Panther's own sense of self.