American Rick Montoya lives in Rome, has an interesting job, and dates a beautiful Italian woman. What more could a guy ask for? How about an undercover job for Italian art police trying to identify traffickers in priceless Etruscan burial urns?

A high school buddy who works as an art cop asks Rick to travel to the Tuscan city of Volterra to pose as an art buyer from Santa Fe, with an expense account and a list of suspects provided. This pleases Rick's uncle no end; he is a prominent policeman in Rome who would love to see his nephew get into police work. Rick's girlfriend Erica, an art history professor, thinks it is his civic duty to take the job, although she doesn't know that a college friend, the sensuous Donatella, is on the suspect list.

Just a few hours after his arrival in Tuscany, Rick finds himself a suspect in a brutal murder. The local commissario, who was not happy in the first place about an amateur on his turf—and worse yet, a foreigner—is less than pleased about Rick's involvement with a murder. The death doesn't appear to be connected to the trafficking operation, but curiously, everyone on Rick's list seems keenly interested in the homicide.

While Rick follows his instructions from the art cops and the policeman tries to track down the murderer, the two men take separate paths through the ancient stone streets, their cases slowly weaving together.