A San Francisco dominatrix, Elizabeth Cromwell, is drawn into the sudden disappearance of Edith Barlow, an heir to the estate of an old friend of Elizabeth's, a woman who herself had vanished seven years earlier. A struggling poetry zine, a mom-and-pop mobile diner in the Northern California redwoods, a 400-meter hurdler who just missed the 2004 Olympics, a women's track coach with a yen for bullwhips, a billionaire with a state-of-the-art S&M dungeon, a man serving a life sentence in Alabama, an enigmatic signature, K(s, x), on a cheap oil painting, an erotic art dealer in Georgia-these are a few of the many mysterious parts in a highly convoluted string of strange disappearances that Elizabeth puts together with the help of an ex-Missouri Highway Patrolman retired in San Francisco on physical disability.