After Chester Daniel David, highly celebrated travel writer and hospitality critic, dies in an automobile accident, his son, Leland, is the heir to his prosperous estate. Among the late writer's possessions are stacks of magazines hidden in an attic that suggest that his stories about his world travels were less than authentic.

As Leland grew up, it seemed as if his father was never home. If he wasn't at the exotic locations depicted in the various publications, then where was he? And what was he doing?

In a witty mystery that simultaneously follows the lives of the father and son, clues that Chester leaves behind point to notorious unsolved crimes committed within a fifteen-year span:

• The D. B. Cooper plane skyjacking and ransom demand in the Pacific Northwest
• The theft from a Caribbean museum of a twenty-four-carat-gold cross recovered from a sixteenth-century shipwreck
• The inexplicable vanishing of $1 million from the Chicago First National Bank
• The theft of a collection of priceless artifacts from a Mexican anthropological museum

As Leland unlocks the mysteries surrounding his father's true life, he finds himself with even more unfathomable questions that he never anticipated asking about his family-and himself.