Los Angeles in nineteen sixty-eight is a troubled place. Assassinations, school walk-outs and student sit-ins have stirred up that famous LA dust and created an atmosphere where it is hard to get your breath, especially if you're a sixty-five year-old private eye. The trouble with thinking that you're at the end of your career is that others might not necessarily agree. A young British archaeologist with a mystery that at first sight seems not to be a mystery at all needs help. Her boss, a senior archaeologist at the university is missing. Has he just absent-mindedly gone off on some wild academic jaunt? Or has he dug something up from the past that somebody doesn't want to see the light of day? In his unexpected last case, a detective has to confront the fact that life and crime in late-sixties Los Angeles can be as complex and troubled as the city itself, and that his successes in the nineteen-thirties carry no guarantee of success in the nineteen-sixties.