Just when Julie thinks that everything is going her way, her new found peace is destroyed by the discovery that she has cancer. Her anxiety is increased by the long wait to discover how bad her condition is, and she is desperate to find distractions to take her mind off things. Gradually she allows herself to be drawn into the problems of her friends - to the extent that she can no longer distinguish fact from fiction, or, in Julie's terms, the difference between death from natural causes and murder. This is the second in the Julie Lane murder mysteries.