Artie Marshall is a scientist. She is perpetually underfunded, relegated to a damp basement, and besieged on all sides by sexist colleagues. Added to that she is immersed in a messy divorce. But she's never been happier: she recently landed her own lab, based in an eclectic think-tank housed in the leafy suburbs of North London.

Artie spends her days studying an obscure cat virus that nobody else in the world seems to have heard of - or cares about. But her arcane little research problem suddenly becomes worryingly relevant as local cats start dropping dead overnight. Matters get worse when people start getting infected too.

Working with her right-hand man Mark, her vet friends and her street-smart technician, Artie races to get to the bottom of the ballooning epidemic. Unexpected assistance arrives in the form of two basement-dwelling mathematicians- a sociopathic recluse and his scary, otherworldly savant mentor. When their mathematical models suggest that the cat plague might actually be more sinister than it first appears, Artie gets drawn into a web of secrets and lies that threatens to blow apart her lab family, undermine her sanity - and endanger her own life.