Having put aside his own radical lifestyle, if not his values, Moses now runs a lucrative P.I. firm in L.A. with a roster of corporate clients. He has a gorgeous Chinese-American girlfriend and unlimited access to courtside seats at Lakers games. His life seems idyllic and, he realizes, somewhat hollow. That hollowness is soon filled by news that the police are looking for his college-age son, Simon, who belongs to a militant ecological group in Northern California and who is suspected of booby-trapping a redwood tree that killed a logger. Moses drops everything and heads up to redwood country with his ex-wife, Suzanne, with whom he has hardly spoken since their none-too-amicable parting years before. Events escalate on all fronts. Moses and Suzanne, lost in guilty reminiscences, rekindle their romance just as the skirmishes between the loggers and Simon's "tree-hugging" group erupt into all-out war, including a bombing in which Simon is implicated. With his career, his love life, and Simon's future on the line, Moses' search for his son, and his quest to prove his innocence, become matters of life and death.