A young doctor at a Boston hospital becomes suspicious when healthy young people undergoing routine operations are mysteriously slipping into irreversible comas.

In 1933 on a German luxury liner sailing from Mexico to Germany, the separate but interlocking stories of the various passengers begins to unfold. Among the many passengers is a divorcee desperate for love and lost youth, a Spanish noblewoman being deported as a political prisoner, an aging alcoholic ballplayer, and a budding Nazi whose brutishness foreshadows the holocaust to come.

Elizabeth Lange is haunted by the tragic death of her sister Leila, who plunged from the balcony of her New York penthouse under mysterious circumstances. While visiting the Cypress Point Spa, Elizabeth decides to find out exactly what happened.