A young woman shows up at Andrew MacCrimmon's country home claiming her mother, a friend of his, has been murdered Then in rapid sequence he gets a letter saying his wife, Karen, has left him for another man; his friend Herb Dodds-Boughty is murdered; and a man breaks into his house to assassinate him. MacCrimmon finds two common denominators: an old lover named Abby Durant, a woman erotically obsessed with him for over twenty-years; and a hundred acre parcel of land south of Santa Rosa he owns that Abby has been desperate to get her hands on. There are more deaths-he was seconds away from being one of them-before he finds who was involved, what they wanted, and why it all happened.