Sydney Covington is an anthropology student who finds herself running for her life when she innocently brings an ancient human bone fragment with her to grad school in New Mexico. She and her photographer boyfriend Emmet Williams' best hope for surviving a triangle of death and destruction is a semi-inept FBI agent.

The relic, an eight inch humerus jaggedly broken at the elbow, had been given to Sydney's father by Professor Johnson, an archeologist friend who directed an ill fated dig in Canyon de Chelly in 1966 where the bone was unearthed. The trouble begins when the beautiful Italian banker Alba Frisetti's operative and part-time antique dealer, Jesús Morales, discovers that the jeweler a few doors down from his Santa Fe shop engraved some almost imperceptible numbers on a bone fragment thirty years earlier. Because the numbers point to the Frisetti family's Swiss bank account and implicates them in illegal activity, it becomes a high priority for the bankers to locate the bone. Although the story touches on the legitimacy of contemporary Native American's claim to be the original Americans, the core of the tale revolves around black-market trafficking of ancient human skeletons.

FBI Special Agent Charles Wilson does his best to keep up with what's going on and at the same time shield Sydney and Emmet from those who would stop at nothing to get their hands on the bone fragment. Greed, pride, fear, and the desire for justice propel Bone of Contention toward its gory conclusion.