Synopsis

The autopsy on John Schaumann was never going to be straightforward, not when Reed found that all the internal organs had been turned into a suppurative mass, and certainly not when he discovered that someone had broken into the mortuary and substituted the body for that of James Fontana, local male prostitute.

And then there was the deformed foetal tissue that kept cropping up. That could only have come from the in vitro fertilisation clinic run by Mel Peyronie, but he denied all knowledge of it.

And things got even stranger when Reed discovered that John Schaumann's blood could burn skin and dissolve agar and that it had mutated pancreatic enzymes in it.

And since Peyronie was married to Sarah Schaumann, John's brother, and since the clinic was owned by Daniel Schaumann, John's father, Reed and the police couldn't help but wonder what precisely was going on.

But Reed had problems of his own. Like his colleague's alcoholism, like his wife's impending hospitalisation for her own in vitro fertilisation, and like the fact that he has fallen in love with Sarah Schaumann.

But odd as it all seemed, it was nothing compared with the truth. John Schaumann was an early example of what can go wrong with manipulation of fertilised embryos and died from massive pancreatitis. Daniel Schaumann wants his son back and is willing not only to kill but even to use his daughter as a surrogate mother.

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