Leo and Lisa meet accidentally. Hardly unusual, except that it happens beside a tomb in a pirates' cemetery in Madagascar - he is naked, and she behaves unconventionally.

A month later, they reluctantly separate after promising to uncover the story of PegLeg Jon, the tomb's resident.

She studies and trains to become a doctor and a hospital manager; he becomes a mathematician and financial analyst. As the years pass and they develop, instead of growing apart, unusual events bring them violently together. Each influences the other until they remember their promise and cooperate to unravel the threads in PegLeg's history. Years after their first meeting, only two unrelated items remain a mystery: a lost chest with unknown contents north of the equator and, far to the south, a religious statue lost in the seventeenth century.

Will Leo and Lisa find them? And what happens if they do? Only PegLeg Jon knows ...