Lauren Mendelsohn, a scholarly thirty-something criminal law professor has fled an unhappy marriage and crumbling career as a prosecutor in San Francisco for a teaching position at a law school in northern California's legendary wine country.
The story begins when she visits Coconut Grove to see her aunt, an eccentric artist. Her fellow houseguest (and fellow Californian) is Desmond Franzini, a writer of historical fiction, there to revive his flagging career with a Miami book tour. Obnoxious and arrogant, he thoroughly alienates Lauren, then leaves on an unexplained "side-trip." Several days later, he turns up dead at a resort in Boca Raton, seemingly of natural causes. Left behind at Olivia's is a memoir by a World War II bombardier.
Back in California, at her aunt's urging, Lauren reluctantly agrees to look into the writer's death. Her journey takes her deep into the lives of two men: the recently deceased Franzini, a novelist desperately struggling to revive his career and the memoirist, a young bombardier who flew missions in the Pacific some fifty years before. Locales range from San Francisco's North Beach to the vineyards of Sonoma as Lauren searches for clues to the past.
Along the way, she explores events that took place in war-era India, China and the Pacific. The bombardier flew the infamous Hump over the Himalayas on grueling supply missions to northern China and was sent, finally, to Tinian for bombing sorties over Japan. The mystery deepens when Lauren learns that the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, took off with its infamous payload from a secret compound on the island.