Professor Helen Vaughan was a top scientist in the field of DNA research, and still only in her middle thirties. But she's found slumped over her desk in her office at the City Hospital, bludgeoned to death by a severe blow to the side of her head. Acerbic and both feared and disliked by her colleagues, she had a colorful private life featuring sado-masochistic games - as the police were soon to discover. Investigation into that, her traumatic upbringing and hospital tensions begin to reveal the deadly obsession that led to her death and the person responsible for it ...