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Walter Sparrow is an animal control officer married to cake shop owner, Agatha; they have a son, Robin. The film opens with Walter narrating the events of his recent birthday. He begins by describing how, when it was almost five o'clock, he received a call to catch a dog. The dog had been cornered in the basement of a Chinese restaurant, and gives chase when Walter approaches. Walter eventually corners the dog, and learns from his name tag that his name is Ned. After being distracted by light reflected off Ned's tag, Walter's arm is bitten by Ned, who escapes again. Walter attempts to follow, but loses Ned at a cemetery. While searching the cemetery, Walter notices the gravestone of Laura Tollins.

Walter is late meeting his wife and while she is waiting, she enters a bookstore called "A Novel Fate". In the store, she leafs through a book titled The Number 23 written by Topsy Kretts. When Walter finally arrives, Agatha announces that she is going to buy the book for him, as it is his birthday.

Once home, Walter starts reading the book, finding what he takes to be odd similarities between himself and the main character, a detective only known as "Fingerling". The main character in the paperback explains that he got the name Fingerling from an obscure children's book, one that to Walter's surprise he had also owned and enjoyed as a child. Also of note, the book details Fingerling's meeting with the "Suicide Blonde" whose obsession with the number 23 drives her to murder her boyfriend and commit suicide. In the novel, her explanations and calculations of almost everything — including names, birth dates, and colors — all adding up to 23, drive her insane.

Walter takes the book back to the bookstore and learns it was self-published and self-printed, and that, according to the apathetic store clerk, the author, Topsy Kretts, never released any other books.

Walter's continued paranoia causes him to have dreams of killing Agatha, again in parallel with the book. After one such vivid dream he drives off in the middle of the night, leaving a note saying that he has to clear his head. Walter winds up in King Edward Hotel and requests room 23. Walter spends the evening finishing the book only to discover that the book stops on chapter 22 with Fingerling on a balcony trying to decide whether or not to jump, after murdering his lover, Fabrizia.

The next day, Walter sees Ned from the hotel room window. He grabs his tranquilizer gun, and begins to follow Ned back to the cemetery. He finds Ned sitting near a grave, and shoots him with tranquilizer gun. He then meets a priest and the gardener, and learns from them that Ned's nickname is "The Guardian of the Dead" due to his fondness for sitting and "watching" the gravestones, with Laura Tollins' grave being the latest. He is told that Laura's grave is empty, as her body was never found. Walter also notices that Laura died on her 23rd birthday, which is in three days.

Later that night, Walter returns home with a newspaper article about the murder of college student Laura Tollins by her psychology professor, with whom she was having sexual relations. The circumstances of the Laura's murder are almost exactly the same as the murders in the Number 23 book. Walter thinks the professor wrote the book as a confession and goes to see him in jail, yet the visit yields nothing. The man proclaims his innocence of the murder and of being the author.

Robin finds a P.O. Box address hidden in the back of the book and they send 23 boxes filled with packing peanuts to it, hoping to draw out the book's author. They wait for Topsy Kretts, who, upon being confronted by Walter, becomes panicked, proclaims Walter should be dead and slits his own throat. Inside the man's pockets, Agatha finds an ID card belonging to a mental institution, showing that the man is Dr. Sirius Leary and tells Walter nothing of it. She goes to the abandoned institute and finds Leary's old office. In a cell covered in calculations of the number 23, she finds an old box with what appears to be Walter's name on it and the case number 85307.

Meanwhile, Robin and Walter, who have been examining the book, discover that every 23rd word on every 23rd page spells out two messages which lead them to "Casanova's Park." They arrive at "Casanova's Park" late that night, and going down the staircase marked "The Steps to Heaven," they realize that there are 23 of them. At the bottom, they dig deep in the ground and discover the remains of a human skeleton, presumably Laura Tollins', but when they return with a police officer, the bones have disappeared. Agatha arrives with Dr. French, only raising Walter's hackles more, and they return home. On the way, they encounter Ned sitting in the road. Walter accelerates, intending to kill him, but stops at the last second when Agatha grabs his injured arm, her fingers stained with dirt.

As Agatha washes her dirt-stained hands at their home, Walter confronts her about taking the bones and accuses her of writing the book. She admits to moving the skeleton to protect him and tells Walter that, in fact, it was he who wrote the book, and shows him the contents of the box from the Institute. In the box there are detective comics, the manuscript of The Number 23 with Walter's name on it and a saxophone, the instrument Fingerling played in the book. Also in the box is an ankle bracelet that belonged to Laura Tollins.

He returns to the hotel room where he tears down the wallpaper and finds almost everything possible that adds up to 23 written all over the wall. Walter begins to remember why he did everything: his father killed himself after Walter's mother's death (With what seems to be a Walther PPK). His suicide note was just pages of things that added up to the number 23. Walter loved Laura Tollins, a woman he went to college with, and grew obsessed with 23 because of his father. Laura eventually began sleeping with her professor and when Walter confronted her about this, she declared that she never loved him. After some provoking, Walter goes into a rage, stabbing her and burying her in the park. Ned observed him burying Laura. Like the character in the book, the professor was the first to walk into the room where Laura was killed, and he picked up the knife, covering the weapon with his fingerprints, and staining his hands with blood. With this, he was subsequently arrested for the murder. Walter then went into the hotel room, wrote the book, everything that adds to 23 on the walls, floor and every other part of the room, and then jumped off the balcony. He survived but suffered severe injuries and trauma, which required intense therapy. Walter then ended up in the institute where Dr. Leary worked. Dr. Leary read the manuscript and, after publishing it, becomes obsessed with the number 23 himself. Because of the fall, Walter suffered memory loss, forgetting that he killed Laura and upon leaving the institute he met Agatha. Walter writes the 23rd chapter of the book, stating his real name, and confessing everything as it actually happened.

Walter now turns himself in, thereby freeing the professor and finally relieving his conscience. Laura Tollins' body is finally interred at the cemetery, at rest, and her professor is set free. According to Walter's lawyer, the judge may lighten his sentence in view of the fact that Walter turned himself in. Though entering prison, Walter Sparrow seems optimistic about himself and his family's future, having taught his son about "justice."

At the end of the movie you see the Bible reading from Numbers 32:23 "Be sure that your sins will find you out."

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