Frank McCord awakes and bolts upright, clawing at his throat for air, drenched in sweat and suffocating from the stranglehold of terror. He knows every blazing red eye, and every putrid swirl of its green slime maelstrom, yet each night it terrifies him anew as he falls into what he hopes to be sleep, but never is. His hours of blackness are filled with the same trailing cry for help and Paula is still dead, and nothing can change that. Frank's private detective work sustains him, but every day, a long defunct foghorn calls him to the concrete jetty where Paula's shoe was found, tapping in the retreating tide, saying Paula was here, Frank, where were you. Frank fears for his sanity when he is engaged by a client who cannot exist, to find a missing person from another century. Behind and above it all resides Tong master Simon, the all-powerful yet unseen disembodied telephone voice that terrifies Tong and society alike. Frank is targeted by the Tong's assassin, Roger Gunderson, amid the perils of typhoons and illicit trades of opium. He is manipulated into time warped events as the raging sea devastates his city. He stumbles into an opium for diamonds deal gone wrong, is targeted by the Great Tong leader, brutalized by a murderous sociopath, and spun through the centuries by the tangle of the times. He follows the wrong trails, trusts the wrong people, loves the wrong woman, and drives himself headlong into a calamitous conclusion that traps him from every direction.