Surviving Muslim Brotherhood terrorists in Egypt, five Americans return home to resume their regular lives: Jax Colby and Arlene Morrissey to Santa Fe, Jake Troy and Karen Foster to Madison, and Bill Bjorn to Iowa City. Colby is in deep mourning for his erstwhile lover, ballet dancer Pavel Massine, who died at at Abu Simbel while preventing a suicide bomber from assassinating the Egyptian president. He travels to Khiev for the dedication there of a bronze statue of Massine commissioned by an appreciative Egyptian government, where he reunites with ballerina Iryna Fokina. After Foster loses her battle with leukemia, the ex-Jesuit professor decides to take his new lover-relationship with Bjorn to the next level, leaving the University of Wisconsin to join the older Mystery novelist in Iowa City and begin teaching at the University of Iowa. That late-spring, 2015, finds Colby also arriving at "Athens in the Cornfields," to start finishing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting, reuniting with friends Bjorn and Troy, and boarding with them at their Victorian home. Both older men begin teaching in the University's summer session, Bjorn as a lecturer for the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop and Troy conducting a seminar for the Anthropology Department. Soon the three men find themselves involved with a Wounded Warrior double-amputee, a cross-dressing pornography writer, an angry red-haired teen recluse and a heavily tattooed itinerant carpenter, plus other unique denizens of the quiet university town. And within the span of a couple weeks, there are three loosely inter- linked murders of a fraternity president, an undercover ICPD gay cop and a Mormon missionary, the police investigations of which reveal indirect ties to Colby, Troy and Bjorn (who has begun writing his next Thom Thane Mystery, Faun Spawn), with the three then finding themselves on horns of dilemma.