On a sunny spring day in Santa Barbara, California, Judy Raskin went home and hanged herself after failing a college exam. Or did she? Her best friend and roommate, Lucy Navarro, thinks not.

Lucy hires the 29-year-old private investigator Dagny Taggart Jamison to look into Judy’s death, noting, “Only a female P.I. would take a case based on a woman’s intuition.” Dagny, for her part, has recently recovered from cancer surgery, and is striving to regain her self-esteem and lost femininity.

Hot on the trail of Judy’s ex-boyfriend, who has fled, Dagny and Lucy find him hanged in the redwood forest that surrounds the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Dagny teams up with forensic pathologist Charles Cranston Clarke, who has discovered an irregularity during the autopsies of the young students. Together, Dagny and Charles explore paths that take them deep into the culture of the Churok Indian nation. Ultimately they will penetrate the heart of perfidy, murder, exploitation, and a contemptible collusion between academe and industry. Danger follows them up and down the coast of California, and they soon find themselves united by a common threat, and by a steamy attraction for each other.