Brain Fever is a story about romance, archaeology, illicit sex and domestic abuse. It is set on a stud farm on the moors of the English county of Yorkshire, between the city of York and the town of Skipton. It is the story of Craig and Cat, who last saw each other 12 years earlier, when, after defending them from a terrible assault by Simon Stalland, Craig had left the country to follow his childhood dream of prospecting for minerals in the mountains of Canada. Cat suffered a broken heart when he left. Would she ever be able to forgive him and recover their lost love? To complicate matters, Craig has met Jemma, an archaeology student working on the dig on the moor behind his home, and Cat is living with another archaeologist in York. She's an osteo-archaeologist herself, and when burials are found on the moors, she is called in to identify them. Simon, meanwhile, appears to have mental troubles, which have changed him into someone who beat his wife and made a 15-year-old schoolgirl pregnant without a second thought.