The six-strong Classics class of an American university forms a mutually distrusting and dependent clique. Its members are more sophisticated than their coke-snorting fellow students and often make secret asides to one another in Latin or Greek.

In a moment of uncontrolled exuberance (actually, during the re-enactment of a Dionysian rite) the leader of the gang murders a chicken farmer. The body (with stomach ripped open) is later discovered by the police. For a while it seems that the group has got away with it. But then