Hugh Madden is a mortician who loves his work; indeed he lives to make his 'sleeping charges' beautiful. When the body of Kincaid, his old medical professor turns up on his slab, he finds himself recalling his undergraduate years at Glasgow university - in particular his friendship with a dangerously charismatic medical student, and the disquieting circumstances that eventually took him away from medicine and into the mortuary. Trapped for forty years in an unsatisfactory marriage to a hypochondriac wife, Madden's carefully ordered life is thrown further into chaos when he sacks his wife's carer, and her son decides she needs 'compensation'. With the threat of violence hanging over him, the sudden reappearance of Kincaid, and the discovery of a body in a nearby Loch, Madden finds the long-buried secrets from his past beginning to resurface, and his own dissatisfaction with the present threatens to turn murderous