Quincy, M.E.

A young woman is raped and strangled on a Los Angeles beach. Further down the coastline a young boy is shot and arrested for her murder. Quincy doesn't think that it would have been possible for the boy arrested to strangle the woman and decides that he is going to go out and begin a little investigation of his own. He visits City Hall where the woman worked to ask some questions and, after a little checking, finds out that there seem to have been a rash of unexplained deaths there.

Margo Bently is writing her first book, the contents of which could prove very damaging to a certain group of people. She is murdered and brought into the lab as a suspected alcoholic prostitute with cirrhosis but Quince thinks the body is telling him something different about her social standing. Quince is asked to present a seminar in Bufflo NY by Asten, while he's preparing his notes Asten takes over in the lab. In Quincys absence, Asten signs the body out to a phoney coroner and Quincy begins tracking her down. This leads him to a murdered literary agent in New York a race to autopsy him before he's cremated so he can prove a link.