How could a healthy forty-one-year old woman die of cardiac arrest? When Glasgow psychiatrist Kellen Stewart learns of the death of her ex-lover Bridget Donnelly, she quickly suspects foul play. Then she discovers that Bridget's brother, Malcolm, died of the same cause just weeks before - hours after bringing some hens to Bridget's country farmhouse for safekeeping. And now those hens are missing... With the help of a friendly pathologist who numbers breaking and entering among her more formidable skills, Kellen investigates the deaths. The trail of evidence will take her into a dangerous maze of valuable hens, lethal eggs, bodies that vanish from the morgue... and biomedical marvels that lead to murder.