Corporate attorney Nollaig (Noli) Cooper, age 34, is tough, single, and ready to change her life. When a family birthday brings her back to her childhood home in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Peter and Tina Hanak, her adoptive parents, propose that she stay and live at their zinfandel winery. But her first day back, the body of her childhood mentor, crusading attorney John (Fitz) Fitzgerald, is discovered in a rocky ocean cove, pecked by seagulls. The sheriff insists it was suicide. Noli knows better. She teams up with Fitz’s PI, Luz Alvarado, daughter of Mexican farmworkers, to find his killer.

Noli learns the Hanaks’ winery has been sabotaged and their lives threatened. As threats escalate, Peter Hanak is framed for murder. To defend him, Noli digs through evidence from wildly diverse sources: the ambitions of a 19th Century robber-baron, the oral history of an early winemaker, and research on zinfandel genetics. Meanwhile, Luz risks her life to expose a dot-com mogul who will stop at nothing to acquire the Hanaks’ property. Webs of greed, hatred and revenge are at last untangled when Peter reveals a painful secret he has carried since the Vietnam war. Ultimately Luz puts everything on the line to halt the escape of Fitz’s murderer, and Noli must plunge through a wall of fire to find the answers.