A fabulous artwork made by Sonia Delaunay, a famous modern artist, is missing from the French village church for which it was designed. Barbara and Sam, an American couple who just bought a tumbledown 15th century house in the village, are inevitably drawn into the mystery of the artwork's disappearance.

Together with their new French friends-longtime villagers and other big city and foreign transplants like themselves, Barbara and Sam attempt to track down the whereabouts of the missing modern masterpiece. Their search takes them from the depths of the church's medieval crypt to the heights of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris.