Legendary chef August Sweeney has served his final meal, dying in the middle of service in the very restaurant he built to secure his legacy. When Dr. Maya Zhu, a guarded, intense autopsist, is summoned to investigate, she discovers she must operate under strict conditions Sweeney himself dictated before he died. As she digs deeper into his immense body, everything that can go wrong, does, because August Sweeney isn't about to let a little thing like death stop him from raising hell. The Death and Life of August Sweeney finds two people drawn together across the barrier of death. In her ruthless drive to excel as a doctor, Zhu has walled herself off from almost everything. As she dissects Sweeney, teasing out the mysteries hidden in his body, she begins to understand that she is doing an autopsy on her counterpoint: an equally ruthless artist who made excess his muse. As she obsesses over what happened to Sweeney under the strangest conditions of her career, her life- and August's death- will never be the same.