Castle knows of four pizzerias named "Nick," with various combinations of the predicates terrific and/or authentic. But their owners, bitter rivals, continually sabotage each other with frat pranks. Then a corpse is found in the pizzeria oven, crisped, but killed by previous stabbing. The owner accuses his rivals, but no one is innocent and everyone has a dirty secret. And the victim, a former war correspondent who lost his edge after his daughter died in a car accident, was reporting on them about their "pizza wars." However, he'd also stumbled across the identity of 'urban myth' Cavallo, a drug lord who viciously executes rivals.