On a Friday in early November, four people head out from the west coast of Florida to dive a deep-water wreck fifty-six miles ashore. Two days later, one of them is found alive, standing atop a 160-foot light tower in the Gulf of Mexico, naked and waving her wetsuit. Of the other three, no trace is ever found. It is as if they have been swept off the edge of the earth. One of them is Ford's friend and neighbor Janet Mueller.

It is then that the rumors begin - whispers of everything from fraud to smuggling to murder. To clear Janet's name, Ford knows that he will have to discover what really happened that dark, starry night, way out in the Gulf Stream - but the answer that he eventually does find is something both less and much more than the whispers, the result of a quest that will take him halfway around the world and very nearly kill him...a truth that will haunt him for the rest of his life.