Trained to be a detective by his father, blessed with astounding powers of observation and deduction, and cursed with a refusal to take anything seriously, Shawn Spencer has convinced everyone he's psychic. Now, with his best friend, Gus, he's either going to clean up, or be found out.
When a case takes Shawn and Gus into the Fortress of Magic, an exclusive club for professional magicians where outsiders are rarely allowed, they're treated to a private show by the hottest act on the Vegas Strip, seven-foot-tall "Martian Magician" P'tol P'kah. But when the wizard does his signature illusion and dissolves in a tank of water, he never rematerializes. And in his place there's a chubby corpse in a three-piece suit and a bowler hat.
Eager to keep his golden boy's image untarnished, the magician's manager hires Shawn and Gus to uncover the identity of the dead man and find out what happened to P'tol P'kah. But to do so, the pair will have to pose as a new mentalist act and go undercover in a world populated by magicians, mystics, Martians, madmen . . . and one murderer.