Sean Desmond, a biologist abandoned by his wife and two sons, sets out for Stockholm to accept a Nobel Prize and finds himself tracked by would-be assassins and protected by a beautiful guardian angel, who teaches him to love again.

Nuala Anne McGrail, a fey, Irish-speaking woman blessed with the gift of second sight, and her husband and accomplice, Dermot Michael Coyne, investigate the brutal beating of Finnbar Burke, the "nice fella" with whom their shy, golden-haired nanny has fallen in love, who is found floating in the Chicago River. Set in late nineteenth-century Chicago.