The truth will find you.
Walter Sparrow is an animal control officer married to cake shop owner, Agatha; they have a son, Robin.It's almost five o'clock when Walter gets a call to catch a dog. He catches the dog and notices on its collar tag that its name is Ned (which he later expands to 'Nasty, Evil Dog' and even later 'Nasty, Evil, Dead Dog'; Nedd with two D's ), but then gets distracted and the dog escapes after biting his arm. It runs to a cemetery, sitting at one particular grave, that of a Laura Tollins.
Because of the incident with the dog, Walter is late meeting his wife and while she is waiting, she enters a bookstore, where she browses through a book called "The Number 23" by Topsy Kretts. When Walter finally arrives, Agatha buys it for him.Walter starts reading the book and sees some similarities between himself and the main character, a detective only known as "Fingerling". Walter takes the book back to the bookstore and learns it is self-published and self-printed, and the author, Topsy Kretts, never released any other books.
Fingerling's story continues. It begins to make Walter believe that Dr. French has romantic designs on Agatha, in parallel with events in the book. Walter begins to think anything associated with the number 23 is cursed or evil because 2 divided by 3 equals 0.6 recurring ( .666: Number of the Beast), as Dr. French explained.
