To Die in Italbar follows Mr. H, a man who needs only to touch someone to heal or hurt them, during a deadly galactic pandemic.

I wrote that in a hurry to make some money after I quit my job.” [3] Heidel von Hymack, known to all as "H", is a man with the power to cure people of incurable diseases.

In fact he has been accidentally joined to a deity of the Pei'an religion, a goddess of disease and healing whose changing moods determine whether he saves or kills.

Elsewhere, Malacar Miles is the last holdout on Earth, the last bastion of the old regime and an obstacle to Sandow and other world builders who want to make the planet habitable again.

Sidney Coleman, writing in F&SF, found the novel greatly inferior to Zelazny's previous novels, although he acknowledged that if evaluated simply as "preposterous adventure," it was a well-written "superior specimen" marked by "fast action," "strong emotion", "colorful characters," and its author's "fertile imagination.