Attorney Willa Jansson is on her way to a new job at a firm specializing in very-nineties multimedia law. Battling rush-hour foot traffic on her way to her first day on the new job, Willa is sidetracked by the spectacle of a close, longtime family friend brandishing a gun on the street. She knows Arthur Kenna, the famous mythology scholar, too well to believe he means any harm, so when she spots a policeman running to arrest him, Willa acts on her instinct to "rescue" him. Pretending to be Arthur's hostage, Willa engineers their getaway through San Francisco's Financial District. Arthur explains to Willa that a passerby had pressed the gun into his hand, but she knows the police aren't likely to believe him, especially now that they think she's been taken hostage. And if they discover Willa is Arthur's friend, she'll no doubt be arrested as well. Worse, when a body turns up later the same morning and the police consider Arthur a prime suspect, to Willa's chagrin she and Arthur are forced to hide out in the mountain cabin of her old flame, Edward Hershey. Realizing that their only way out of hiding is to figure out who actually is responsible for the murder, Willa and Arthur enter a bizarre netherworld in which they meet high-tech software designers who claim that the murder victim was helping to develop a cybernetic shaman ... or was he performing shamanic psychiatry on a real computer nut? Barely eluding the police, Willa must cope with the "demigod Pan," survivalists in ersatz Indian abodes, and a host of other forest eccentrics - some of whom may be computer spies ... and one of whom is about to kill again.