While touring the classical sites of south-western Turkey during the early 1980s, the beautiful American wife of a rich dealer in Middle Eastern artifacts finds herself mysteriously stranded in Ephesus, and obliged to seek help from a Scottish archaeologist who faces the even more puzzling - and graver - problem of having just killed, in self-defence, an unknown assailant. Subsequent events assume a disquieting resemblance to those in a tale, half history, half myth, concerning a beautiful and murderous queen, her lover, and the fate of Croesus, last king of the region.