A woman claims a strange, almost paranormal ability to ease their last moments of consciousness as the elderly lie dying.
A policeman wonders whether, far from helping them, she is murdering them.
Alex Westerman is aware that the values that have sustained him over a long police career are coming undone. Yet when news of his failing health breaks and he is suspended from the force, he feels impelled to continue with the investigation on his own.
Angela Howarth carries a secret from the night her grandmother died while she was still in her teens. Now in her thirties, she frets that her gift has served to prevent her enjoying a full life in this world. She is drawn into a friendship with Hiromi Ikuda, a Japanese scientist, and finds herself attracted by a sensibility she discerns beneath the rigour of his scientific ethos. As their intimacy develops, she is driven to question the nature of her gift.
But it is at the moment of the unravelling of Angela's secret, in which all three face their own or another's death, that the limits of what we can ever know about those we care for are made clear. And with that knowledge comes, for all three, an insight into the irreducible preciousness of all our lives.
"The Gift" looks at the conflict between the mystical and the rational, and also at the tensions between individual freedom and the constraints of the law. It asks whether the notion of the good death can ever be something other than illusory.