Three women, three generations, two races, all making their own choices.

Spring 1984: Vince Kindel, a brilliant, charismatic Berkeley PhD candidate, vanishes.

His disappearance pulls his older brother Justin—an MIT astrophysicist--into a treacherous world of immense wealth, secret intrigue, and murder. At the center stands San Francisco grande dame Alicia Comstock, one of the richest women in America.

Old, formidable, and running out of time, Alicia sends Justin into Vince’s department to ask the questions no one there wants to answer.

Berkeley replies with grotesques: a pompous Shakespearean who pulls a knife on Justin when he mentions incest in King Lear, and a bizarre Chaucer scholar orchestrating a ruthless vendetta against an acclaimed Black woman writer.

With Alicia’s astute grandniece Amélie at his side, and Vince’s bereaved lover playing Horatio to his Hamlet, Justin follows a trail of lives crippled in silence. He will get his answer even if Alicia does not live to hear it.

But what he uncovers is larger than one disappearance: a culture war over what can be said, who will be silenced, and what bureaucracy gets to bury.

Some crimes bury bodies, others bury truth. This novel exhumes both.