Russell Pearce is an investigative journalist who decided to quit his newspaper job and work freelance. It hasn't gone well. The pressure of his failing freelance career is putting stresses on his marriage which is in deep trouble. Driving home one night from the lake district west of Austin where a key source has just imploded his last hope for his last viable story, Russ stops at a tourist overlook on the twisting Mission Drive, a scenic cliffside road high above the Colorado River and overlooking the historic Spanish Solito Mission and its small community. Suddenly the headlights of two speeding cars appear on the winding curves of the drive coming his way, their headlights panning wildly with each turn. As the two cars scream past him Russ watches in astonishment as they recklessly disappear around the next bend—then abruptly he hears screeching tires and the headlights of one of the cars swerve and lurch into the night sky and then down as the car plunges off the road and down the steep hillside as the other car flees.

Stunned, Russ scrambles down to the wrecked car which had slammed into a huge tree, saving it from plummeting off the high cliff down to the river. Inside the crumpled car he finds a dying man. His face smashed horribly, he can barely talk as he fights to stay conscious. He begs Russ to give a message to a woman named Sharlene. The message is cryptic and fraught with urgency and menacing implications. The man dies without telling Russ the woman's last name.

In just a few short minutes Russ' life changes dramatically and he finds himself inside a riddle in which he now has a critical role, though he doesn't know what it is or what its about. But as his journalistic instincts kick in, he also realizes that he is outside the riddle as well, and that he has stumbled upon the beginnings of a hell of a story—and an opportunity to turn around his career.

With the help of his wife Maret, who postpones leaving him to help him regain his professional footing, the two uneasy partners peel apart the layers of a complex plot.

It is the story of two intertwining elements: how a controlling and cruel tech company CEO contrives to steal his wife's lucrative inheritance, the company he runs; and the inextricable complexities of human relationships that no one can ever truly understand, or escape.