Scott Weston is a private investigator who is supposedly hired by a rich businessman to determine whether or not his beautiful wife is fooling around behind his back. During the course of his investigation Weston begins his own steamy affair with the wife. The husband then turns up dead and Weston becomes a prime suspect. Did he do it? Has he been set up? Or is he the victim of a third degree burn?

The setting is Vienna. A young American woman is brought to a hospital after overdosing on pills, apparently in a suicide attempt. A police detective suspects foul play on the part of her lover, an American psychology professor. As doctors try to save her life, the detective interrogates the professor, and through flashbacks we see the events leading up to the woman's overdose; her stormy and intensely sexual relationship with the professor, her heavy drinking and numerous affairs, and her estrangement from her Czech husband. A darkly erotic study of several rather unsympathetic characters.