In Nina O`Reilly`s tenth suspenseful outing, the attorney is temporarily away from her home turf in Lake Tahoe, staying with her boyfriend, P. I. Paul van Wagoner, in Monterey, and sorting out how to respond to his marriage proposal. Meanwhile, she is helping out an old mentor by taking on a seemingly impossible case: defending a young man who has confessed to stealing the skeleton of a Russian immigrant who died 20 years ago, but claims to be innocent of murdering the second, considerably fresher corpse found in the same grave.