When an attractive young woman is found dead at a bus stop on a cold, rainy November morning, detectives Rankin and Kalinski must find the person who hated her enough to kill her in such a brutal way. Was it a family member, a boyfriend, or one of the defendants in a lawsuit she had filed against those responsible for the euthanasia of her comatose stepbrother? In trying to revenge her stepbrother, she had engaged her friends, family members and classmates in an attempt to get the new law allowing euthanasia repealed, but in doing so, had annoyed many of them, broken up her father's marriage, and had become the target of obscene phone calls and a poison pen letter. To the surprise of the detectives, people they talked to were more interested in the euthanasia of the stepbrother than in the identity of the murderer.