The book, set in an unnamed, landlocked country at a point in the unspecified past, opens with the end of death.

Though the traditional sources for guidance on things like life and death endeavor to discover why people have stopped dying, religious authorities, philosophers, and scholars alike can find no answers.

The complete cessation of dying leads to a growing fear among healthcare workers that the system will collapse under its own weight: generations of incapacitated, but still living, people will populate care homes and hospitals for, presumably, all eternity.

Funeral directors, on the other hand, fear the opposite problem: they will have no business, and will be forced to move to preparing animals for the afterlife.

A means of finally killing people, and relieving families of the burden of their catatonic kin, is devised and implemented by an underground group known only as the maphia (the 'ph' is chosen to avoid any confusion with the more sinister Mafia).

Although originally intending merely to analyze this man and discover why he is unique, death eventually becomes infatuated with him, so much so that she takes on human form to meet him.