Katherine Markham is a 27 year old Londoner who has drifted away from her PhD studies in Oxford, and become a regular at sex parties, where the rich, beautiful, and bored play in perverse decadence. One night in Mayfair she meets newbie Nick, a marketing executive trying to escape his banal work and stale relationships. After a brief frisson in a pool, they witness an esoteric and sadistic ritual in which a young pregnant blonde woman appears to be thrown from the roof.
Alone, the night before is a blur. Katherine notices a mark below her navel which turns out to be a tattoo in the shape of an infinity sign. Being a woman very much in control of her sexuality, this freaks her out but she can’t piece together what has happened to her and who is responsible. A series of dead ends eventually leads her to contacting Nick who has been more successful with his search, and they return to the location of the party, where they get information from a group of squatters about the identity of the missing woman.
Nick and Katherine explore London together in pursuit of the lost blonde. Nick finds Katherine’s sexual and intellectual liberation beguiling. She doesn’t know who to trust yet is smitten, against her better nature, by the cynical and witty Nick.
Katherine’s wannabe boyfriend, Zach, a jealous self-described alpha male lawyer, hacks her email and goes to a country house party to spy on her. He is kidnapped and tortured by Konrad, the head of a dubious genetic research institute. Katherine, believing that she is discovering clues to the whereabouts of Zach ends up following a trail deliberately set for her that puts her in a sinister private clinic in Italy.
Katherine's quest to discover who is behind all this and who she can trust leads her on a wild adventure to the outer reaches of science, sexuality, and love, in a novel filled with dark humour and challenging ideas about contemporary life.
