While vacationing in Sardinia, Ian McGann meets Death in a dream. Death promises to answer any of McGann's questions, but if he fails to understand the answers he will have to pay with his life.

In Los Angeles, revered film actress Arlen Ford is no longer happy living in the Hollywood fast lane. She gives up everything – her career, her home, her glamorous lifestyle – and moves to Austria, where she meets a passionate war correspondent. From the start, their relationship is all-consuming. Arlen realizes she has been waiting for this man all her life.

And in Vienna, the terminally ill Wyatt Leonard suddenly discovers that he has the ability to raise the dead.

How all three of these fates converge is at the heart of Jonathan Carroll's most daring and provocative novel, in which he dares to ask – and answer – the ultimate question: What is Death?