The irrepressibly curious Isabel Dalhousie, founding member of the Sunday Philosophy Club and editor of Edinburgh's Review of Applied Ethics, is caught up in an affair of the heart—albeit a transplanted one—in this second novel of the series. While running her niece Cat's delicatessen, Isabel meets a man with a most intriguing problem: he recently had a heart transplant and now seems to be pestered with memories of events that never happened to him. The situation appeals to Isabel as a philosophical question—is the heart truly the seat of the soul? She also wonders if the memories could be connected to the donor's demise.