Banished to the "death page" at the Austin Sentinel after sleeping with her boss, Cauley MacKinnon is eager to shed her shameful title as the Obituary Babe and put her new journalism degree to good use. When her childhood friend Scooter Barnes, exotic pet store owner and former Dallas Cowboy, threatens suicide, she sneaks into the crime scene and manages to talk him out of it. But Scooter is later found dead and everyone -- a hot FBI agent, a menacing one-eared maniac, the Argentinean mafia, and a flirtatious customs agent -- wants the scoop on what he told Cauley in his last hours. Up to her eyelashes in dead bodies, Cauley gets mixed up in a Texas-sized hunt for Scooter's killer and also manages to fall for a couple of cuties involved in the murder case.