It's 1927, and eleven-year-old Willie Radcliff is branded the worst outlaw in the Northern California hamlet of Newville. Molly Radcliff can't handle him, and Preston Radcliff is too involved with his burgeoning agricultural empire to spend time with his rapidly growing son. In 1929, Preston moves the family to Radcliff Mansion, nine miles west of Chico, and thirteen-year-old Willie turns his attention from shooting the neighbors' goats and chickens to poaching wildlife.

Willie inherits the family fortune in 1962, becomes a multimillionaire himself, and arranges hunting ventures-not just in Northern California but all over the world. In the spring of 1973, he pays a quarter million dollars to kill an endangered Siberian tiger in Soviet Russia's Primorsky Krai. Six months later, Northern California Fish and Game Warden Henry Glance is on Radcliff's trail, discovering clues to Radcliff's lifetime of wildlife crimes. The investigation that follows leads Glance to a mansion full of protected animals, a burned-out shack, and two dead bodies.