Build a movie plot around this: Who is the dead man found in the motel room? Herb Kline
Neil Agar, a special agent with the State Department's Office of Security (the predecessor of the Diplomatic Security Service), is dispatched to Peckham, California to investigate the death of John Grubowsky, a bacteriologist working at government-sponsored Brandt Research. Quickly making the acquaintance of the laboratory's head librarian, Julie Zorn, he begins interviewing the firm's leading scientists, many of whom have reputations as sexual players. His investigation is soon complicated by a growing number of deaths, all men who died of congestive heart failure caused by sexual exhaustion.Faced with a rapidly escalating body count, the local sheriff, Captain Peters, holds a town meeting at which the laboratory's leading sex researcher, Henry Murger, urges the town populace to practice sexual abstinence an idea greeted with derision by the locals. Neil and Julie arrange a meeting with Murger afterwards to discuss his theories as to the cause of his deaths, only to see him chased down and run over by a car with an unseen driver. While investigating Murger's home in search of clues, Neil discovers a secret room concealing sexual paraphernalia and Murger's gay lover, Joe, who informs Neil that he saw Murger driving off with an unknown woman prior to his death.Despite a curfew and the establishment of a military quarantine, the scientists continue playing their sex games. One of them, Herb Kline, is approached by Susan Harris, a beautiful entomologist working on bees. Though described by the men as an "iceberg," she flirts with Kline and invites him over for dinner. That night, as they engage in sex, Kline suffers a fatal thrombosis and Harris reveals black compound eyes suggesting that she is more than she appears.Meanwhile, convinced there is a similar pattern at work, Neil begins studying the sexual patterns of insects. Seeking information about the mating habits of bees, he interrogates Dr. Harris at her lab; when he departs, she resumes her project the transformation of Kline's wife Nora into a...