When a medical waste container has washed up on the beach with two decomposed bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting and bound with electrical wire, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan recognizes many details as identical to those of an unsolved case she handled in Quebec fifteen years earlier. Meanwhile, the citizens of Charleston are struck by capnocytophaga, a bacterium that, at its worst, can eat human flesh. Shockingly, Tempe eventually deduces not only that the victims in both grisly murder cases are related, but that the murders and the disease outbreak also have a common cause.