Pepper Reece, owner of the Spice Shop in Seattle's Pike Place Market, loves a good festival, especially one that serves up tasty treats. So what could be more fun than a food walk in the city's Chinatown International District, celebrating the Lunar New Year, the Year of the Rabbit? But when her friend Roxanne stumbles across a man's body in the Gold Rush, a long-closed residential hotel, questions leap out. Who was he? What was he doing in the dust-encrusted herbal pharmacy in the hotel's twisty-turny basement? Why was the pharmacy boarded up - and why are the owners so reluctant to talk? With the discovery of a box of letters written in Chinese - a box that later goes missing - Pepper and her friends find themselves asking new questions and facing more brick walls. Then questions arise about Roxanne herself, and her relationship to Pepper's boyfriend Nate, away fishing in Alaska. Between worrying about Nate, Roxanne, and her parents' pending departure, while struggling to hire new staff at the Spice Shop, Pepper has her hands and her heart full. Still, she can't resist the lure of the Gold Rush and its tangled history of secrets and lies stretching back nearly a hundred years. But the killer is on her tail, driven by hidden demons and desires. As Pepper begins to expose the long-concealed truth, a bigger question emerges: Can she uncover the secrets of the Gold Rush Hotel without being pushed from the wok into the fire?