Private eye Sam Montcalm is hired by a wealthy developer and former arms manufacturer to check out his wife, who may be having an affair with the noted political journalist Jed Paul Mehta.
Sam prepares to follow Mehta to LA, and to investigate the journalist's connection with the beautiful wife. Before he departs, however, an old friend, the violinist Cristina Montenegro, sends him C.G. Jung's visionary Red Book and hires him for her own purposes.
In California he finds a world of murder, conspiracy, and passion, while being initiated, via the Red Book, into the alchemy of personal transformation. Sam learns that Mehta is investigating a U.S. government cover-up involving the use of depleted uranium in weapons, which may have resulted in genetic damage to civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, and that his wealthy client may be involved. He begins to understand that the alchemy of weapons production originates from an alchemy in the soul that chooses power over self-knowledge.
With action in Westwood and Los Feliz and a shootout at California Plaza, above the famous Angel's Flight Railway (scene of so many events in private eye movies and fiction), the novel moves toward its surprising . conclusion at Walt Disney Concert Hall.