A rookie security guard at Dublin Airport spots a pool of dried blood under a rental car - an American is found bludgeoned to death in the trunk. Garda Inspector Matt Minogue soon learns that there's more at stake here than the murder of a visitor, more even than adverse publicity for Ireland's vital tourist industry.

Patrick Shaughnessy, the dead man, did not travel like an ordinary tourist. He attended lavish society parties thrown by leading arts patrons, conferred with museum curators, and paid a special visit to the site of the Stone Age Carra community on Ireland's rugged west coast. Shaughnessy, it turns out, was the son of Irish American multimillionaire Johnny Leyne, and Inspector Minogue finds himself in charge of an investigation under intense media scrutiny and fraught with political entanglements. What drew Shaughnessy to archaeology and antiquities, a world as foreign to him as his absent father's homeland? What was he after, and what connection, if any, existed between his personal quest and his death? Who would want Shaughnessy dead, and why?