While delivering large sums of a dying friend's money to beneficiaries who never heard of him, Elizabeth Cromwell, a San Francisco dominatrix and rare book collector dreaming of retirement, stumbles onto a series of murders related only by a book left at the scene. She also stumbles upon Stan, an unemployed mathematician. With trips to Mojave, Lodi, and Los Angeles, and visits to a revolutionary gathering, the Fairmont Hotel, and a desert diner, the pair uncover a revenge scheme that reaches back to the earliest white exploiters of California.
