Russell Blaze was a man who had it all. The highway accident that killed him was a sudden tragedy--until his son Cody found the letter and the manuscript. One said he feared being murdered; the other told the tale of a man and a life unknown to his devoted family--the years of abuse, murder, and racial entanglement amid the love and violence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in its not-so-golden "hippie" era.

The story Cody reads fascinates him, a world away from his own happiness and success. But as it moves closer to the present moment, he and those he cares about become ensnared as well, until a battle of life and death becomes the only way out.