Robert Kinsolving is healthy, wealthy and forty-one, and has asked Jesse Falkenstein to draw up a will leaving everything to his sister, just in case. However, before signing, Kinsolving is found dead in an apparent suicide. Jesse is far from convinced, and discovers that Robert was actually not a Kinsolving at all, and anyone who may have benefited from his death is now seriously short-changed.

It now becomes Jesse's job to track down Robert's birth mother, and the mystery turns from a whodunit to a where-is-she.

'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune