Eleanor Flynt stands in her living room in Berkeley California looking out at the San Francisco Bay as she ruminates about the disappearance of her husband Kirby, renowned archeologist, who flew away exactly one year ago in a small plane with his close friend, Petey Strunk. After search crews gave them up for dead she doesn’t know how or why, but her obsessive thoughts tell her otherwise.

A few days later Eleanor takes her daily walk with her constant companion, a Corgi named Jupi. While they are gone an intruder breaks into Kirby’s basement office. They return earlier than usual. Alerted by Jupi’s scratching and whining at the door leading down the stairs to Kirby’s office Eleanor goes down for the first time in years and realizes someone has just been there. She begins to snoop and discovers Kirby’s wall safe was opened. After more sleuthing she finds a key to Kirby’s desk drawer containing a box with two items: a Hopi Corn Mother Relic, and a native American medicine bundle.

Through her friendship with Richard Wilson, cultural anthropologist, married to psychologist Rebecca Calhoun, Eleanor has been seeing Rebecca to process her grief and the mystery of Kirby’s disappearance.

Things escalate as Eleanor and her friends realize they are not the only ones searching for Kirby.

As friends and allies join the search, they enter the slippery slope of antiquities’ looting for profits. Local and international laws can barely keep up with this growing and changing mercurial world with black markets full of intrigue, danger and duplicities where there is no room for amateurs.

Eleanor must come to grips with the reality that the husband she admired and idealized was not who she thought he was. Somewhere over the years of their twenty-five-year marriage Kirby flipped from archeologist to looter, and then from looter to forger.