When Detective Hinky Doanes parachutes in to become chief of the tired old Oakwood Mills police force, people expect heads will roll-but not down the streets of the town's tony residential neighborhood of mostly ethnic-Asian businessmen, professors, and researchers. Soon, the grisly decapitation has attracted investigators from the state police, and when the separated heads and bodies of Chinese-American businessmen and scientists continue to show up in nearby states, the FBI becomes involved. Despite having no claim to jurisdiction, Hinky and his friend Charlie Lee, an ethnic-Chinese officer of the nearby state university's police services, pursue their own unofficial investigation, which leads them back in time and halfway around the world to Tiananmen Square in June 1989, where they discover the true identity of the popular folk-hero "Tank Man" and his Chinese radical friends, and learn the intimate connection between old political and personal animosities and present-day international business imperatives that seem to include serial murders. The meddling of Hinky and his friend not only brings down the wrath of the FBI but draws critical attention from the town council, the university's police services administration, and national intelligence officials in Washington and Beijing-threatening Hinky's and Charlie's lives and livelihoods. Persevering seems foolhardy, but if they can solve the murders and apprehend the murderers, the bloodshed will stop, their reputations will be assured, and public order will be restored.