Eric Foster, the best student at the world’s top perfume school, creates a perfume he calls Balquees, a formulation based on the fragrance the Queen of Sheba wore to seduce King Solomon.  Upon testing it surreptitiously at a gathering of glitterati in the Pantheon in Paris, he discovers that it works even better than he imagined.  Balquees is a true aphrodisiac, the holy grail of perfumery.  Eric sees stardom on his horizon, all his dreams realized, until he is kicked out of the school and blackballed for a theft he did not commit.

In New York eleven months later, Eric slogs through the day at a job he hates, Quality Assurance Officer for a mid-rank manufacturer of scents that make fabric softener smell “soft” and new cars smell “new.”  His only satisfaction comes from a sideline he has created as a consulting forensic perfumer for the NYPD.  But his satisfaction turns into a nightmare when he is called to a murder scene where it appears that a perfume called SF drove the woman to strangle her boyfriend.  SF, he instantly recognizes, is Balquees.  And just as quickly, he becomes the prime suspect, for it turns out that SF is the only common link in a whole string of passion-driven murders and assaults.

While the cops try to prove he is the maker and marketer of SF, Eric struggles desperately to find the true culprit, a struggle that takes him to Yemen and France and makes him doubt every friend he ever had.