Glassblower Emmeline Dowell—Em to her friends—has enough on her plate to keep her busy. She manages her own shop, Shards, in Tucson, and she makes the blown-glass objects she sells there. Then there are her two dogs, Fred and Gloria--and her brother Cam who visits now and then. And warmhearted Em has a tendency to adopt human strays as well, so when Allison McBride wanders into her shop one day, Em can tell that Allison could use a friend.

But when Allison's husband turns up dead in Em's studio, his head in her glass furnace, things start to heat up.