Private investigator Neil Ames is forced to confront his bottled-up feelings of grief when he is hired to probe the murder of a retired investigative journalist. He returns to the historic Trotter Apartments where his fiancé was murdered twenty years earlier and finds he must work with the same police detective who mishandled evidence leading to the release of her murderer. 

Neil and his friend, the beautiful and brilliant Octavia Clarke, follow a trail of clues to murders in San Francisco, urban sneaker culture, a mythical Japanese tree thought to be extinct, and to the Tokyo headquarters of Yuu International Holdings, one of the world’s biggest conglomerates and the subject of the victim’s last exposé.

A building full of suspects, a world of power brokers exposed by the victim, and an attempted hit on Octavia, propels Neil to a stunning revelation of global proportions and a heartbreaking conclusion: his fiancé had a secret life he knew nothing about.