The Yosemite Foothills in California are the landscape against which The Mockingbird File plays out. The dry, brown-dusty earth dotted with varieties of pine and oak is the home of many self-reliant individualists. Although they live several hours east from the farthest west, their lives are still shaped by the frontier mold. In this sparsely populated community Armen Anoukian, a semi-retired CIA under cover agent whose front is a pistachio farm, is assigned to investigate and smash the La Paz, a California drug ring. He does so by recruiting a team of disparate individuals from his neighborhood, a complex undertaking fraught with personality conflicts and always on the brink of collapsing. Until the climax and the conclusion, the outcome stays in doubt. Tension builds steadily through the story, which is peppered by subplots of intrigue, envy and romance, not to mention back-stabbing, murderous drug lords in a milieu of illegal Hispanics.