For most of his adult life, Paul Arrone has focused on death. He is one of the leading funeral directors in a tony suburb of New York City. His life undergoes an abrupt change, however, when he's called in the middle of the night to pick up the body of a U.S. Senator's wife, who died in an accident in Eurpose. Paul notices the strange way in which her body is shipped. Paul's curiosity leads him to stumble upon a terrorist smuggling ring that spans the globe that involves bio-terrorism, drugs, a multinational corporation and corrupt government officials. While Arrone struggles to make sense of it all, he also wrestles with the one death that has always haunted him-that of his twin brother, the legitimate heir to the family business. A confluence of events bring together the young lover of the dead Senator's wife, the middle-aged Westchester funeral director and the octogenarian chairwoman of a Swiss Bank to fight the Senate chairman of Homeland Security.