Set in contemporary Los Angeles against a background of riots and random acts of violence, The Universal Donor evokes a world where life and love are at every turn menaced by unknown forces, not all of them external to ourselves.

Virginia Lee is a scientist, a proudly rational woman who acts on what she thinks, never on what she feels. When she marries for reasons more practical than romantic, she is shocked at the "safety" with which she's lived her life. She begins to take risks, and soon goes much too far. Terry McKechnie is a physician whose emergency-room cases challenge his sense of what is true about his world, his work, and himself. He is growing numb to his own humanity. Then he meets Virginia.

At the center of this couple's story is a freakish accident, a moment of willful carelessness whose complications, both medical and emotional, multiply out of control.