It's early summer 1983 and Navy Petty Officer Third Class Nicholas Price has left his ship in Okinawa after receiving a letter from his wife that he was not supposed to read. But at some point during his trip across the vast Pacific to meet a divorce lawyer in San Diego, he vanishes?and is neither seen nor heard from again. That is, until hikers find his body on a muddy seaside trail on the Big Island of Hawai'i. In 1997.

Twenty years later, an anonymous stranger connects Hawaiian PI Noelani Lee with a woman seeking answers to her stepfather's unsolved murder. Fresh off the biggest case of her career, Noelani takes the job?and soon finds herself going shadow-to-shadow with clandestine figures from the past as she takes an unwitting journey back in time to the Cold War.

Shrouded by cloaks and threatened by daggers, Noelani finds herself trying to outwit an array of old-school international spooks to uncover the truth?and the decades-old secrets?behind a heartbroken sailor's lonely death on a muddy Big Island trail.