Hosea Smoke, a Cherokee woodcarver, is spending a week at a small college in Oklahoma City, at a Native American art fair, exhibiting carvings. Among the other exhibitors is Esau Brown, an obnoxious man suspected by many of having faked his claims to Indian ancestry. When Smoke and his nephew, Mason Littlehorse, discover Brown murdered in his trailer, the list of suspects grows longer by the minute. After he finds a suspicious package in his car, apparently left there by Brown shortly before his death, Smoke finds himself dragged unwillingly into the murder investigation. Together with his nephew, he begins to look deeper into the murder, and a dark conspiracy begins to unravel.