Fish O'Fiesh, a West Virginian collector of Lewis Carroll, is woken by the barking of his two mastiffs. Stumbling out of bed in his West Virginia mansion he finds his house engulfed in flames, the fire set by an arsonist. He has only time to get the dogs out safely and grab his prized book, "The Skinny Alice", and wait for the firetrucks, which are too late to save anything, including his multi-million dollar collection of Alician foreign language translations and curiosa. After making a list of people who might want him dead (a total of no less than twenty-eight) he sets out to find who on the list might have hired the arsonist to kill him and destroy his collection. His search starts with identifying the now dead arsonist and in the process falls in love with Clare, the arsonist wife, and their young daughter. Clare provides one critical clue which Fish uses to track down a rival Carroll collector, a Houstonian millionaire named Mister Meester, who is furious with Fish because he bought a rare first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland out from under him. Taking a clue from the deep ocean anglerfish, he dangles an irresistible lure that Meester swallows, and Fish takes his revenge. However, Fish believes that there were probably other people on the list involved in his attempted murder and in searching for them he enters the expensive world of rare comic books.