When automotive-additive heiress Anita Hereford and her pharmaceutical-heir and cricket-enthusiast husband Steven call on Leo Schwartz to ask him to find their missing son, Stacy, an AI researcher most recently teaching at MIT, Schwartz's assistant, leg man, and amanuensis Rainer Zufahl is not a bit surprised that his boss takes on the job. After all, finding people is a part of a private detective's routine.

Neither Schwartz nor Zufahl could possibly know the work was anything but routine and that they had agreed to perform the impossible. When successful entrepreneur, businessman, and "green" roofing expert Ken Spall suspects his third wife, Virginia, is doing what his first and second wife did, namely sleeping around on him, he comes to Leo Schwartz and Rainer Zufahl for help.

He wants his wife followed whenever she goes out, which means they need a four-observer team. Fortunately, they know just the men for the job: Paul Surcott, Frank Kinder, Sonny Weinstein, and Jon Meeks.

When Spall receives notice of a decades-old agreement about a loan the founder of the company, Spall's grandfather, received from a friend when starting out in the 'eighties, so that half of Spall's company belongs to a stranger, he comes to Leo Schwartz again, and this time only Schwartz himself will do. When the body of Allison Morgan is found floating face down in the canal in Broad Ripple, with two bullets from an assault rifle in the back, all the evidence seems to point to Gordon Black, her former husband, as the shooter: his apartment overlooks the canal where she was found, and the pathway alongside it, in his bedroom closet is the silenced AR-15 that fired the bullets, and he has no alibi.

But Leo Schwartz thinks Gordon is innocent precisely because his ex-wife's body was found in the canal. It's not unusual for Schwartz and Zufahl to have more than one case on at one time, but they don't always turn out to be connected below the surface.

Two of these do, and the other one complicates Zufahl's social life as never before. .