Neil Agar, a special agent with the State Department's Office of Security (the predecessor of the Diplomatic Security Service), is dispatched to Peckham, California to investigate the death of John Grubowsky, a bacteriologist working at the government-sponsored Brandt Research. Quickly making the acquaintance of the laboratory's head librarian, Julie Zorn, he begins interviewing the firm's leading scientists, many of whom have reputations as sexual players. His investigation is soon complicated by a growing number of deaths, all men who died of congestive heart failure caused by sexual exhaustion.