Townsend Reeves is a bona fide physician, but he took up radiology because he abhors bodily fluids, and finds the company of naked bodies loathsome unless they are of his own choosing. Nevertheless, he's Doctor Reeves, and so he is plucked out of the crowd when modern dancer Gerard Moreau, whose troupe is performing in Kansas City, falls ill during a giant society gala given in his honor. Townsend can only accede, praying that the medics arrive before he has to give mouth-to-mouth. They don't.Earlier that day, since he is temporarily "out of practice," the good doctor helps out a fertility specialist. Barely making it into the office through a mob of misinformed anti-abortion demonstrators, Townsend officiates at an artificial insemination case to an extent that he had neither planned nor expected.On the marital front things aren't great, either. Though he is still in love with his dancer wife Leslie - and she with him - the couple can't get it together. Leslie has been in New York pursuing her career and is now back in Kansas City with a company rivaling Moreau's. When it develops that Moreau was murdered, information Townsend stumbles upon traumatizes Leslie's company as the troupe's famed choreographer becomes a suspect.Hard to believe, but this is only the start-up of a darkly comic tangle of unhappy events that inexorably come together, with Townsend at dead center. He suffers embarrassment, deliciously wicked temptation, dire peril for his life, and ambivalence about his endeavors in the fertility field as he tries to find Moreau's real killer. Read Less