Ellen Parker is a junior heart surgeon living in New York. The city is her hideout, the hospital is her life, and her patients her unwitting guinea pigs. While Ellen hungers to discover the intimate secrets of the human body, both on the operating table and in her sexual odyssey, her knowledge of herself and her own desires remains just out of reach. As the novel explores those secrets in ever more nightmarish ways, it becomes clear that the tension between Ellen's demanding career and disturbing sex life cannot be maintained, with the two worlds destructively colliding. Will Ellen's desire for control-both over her career and her difficult past-also be her undoing?