Miriam Beckstein has gotten in touch with her roots and they have nearly strangled her. A young, hip business journalist in Boston, she discovered that her family comes from an alternate reality, and that her family is too much like the mafia for comfort.

In addition, women are family property and required to breed more family members with the unique talent to walk between worlds; however, she has tried to remain an outsider and her own woman. She fell in love with a distant relative but he's dead, killed saving her life. There have been murders, betrayals. Now, however, she may be overreaching.

And if she gets caught, death or a fate worse is around the bend. There is, for instance, the brain-damaged son of the local king who needs a wife. But they'd never make her do that, would they?