When recently divorced Josh Greer, a somewhat opinionated and disillusioned former English instructor, takes his usual morning bike ride to the fog-bound Seal Beach pier, he rides into a mystery that will alter the course of his life, a mystery ranging in time from the Polish concentration camps of WW II to 1986, the current time for Josh in this story, and geographically from the Long Beach area to Baja California and back. Through his involvement with horrors of the past and contemporary crime, Josh finds a new love, suffers great loss, and achieves his ambition for changing his career.