<p>Retired backpacking friends Sti and Rob are secretly asked to investigate the death of a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power employee killed in the Los Angeles Aqueduct decades earlier. The death was ruled an accident but the victim&rsquo;s wife has recently discovered evidence that suggests her husband was murdered.</p><p>Sti and Rob are reluctant to engage the widow&rsquo;s request but the challenge appears innocent enough so they agree. They soon stumble into a conundrum of disappearances and deaths going back a half-century or more. They uncover bizarre circumstances involving clandestine plans to build a road across the Sierra Nevada and there&rsquo;s even mention of a plane crash and the lingering myth of a missing cache of gold.</p><p>The two find themselves pursuing leads that take them to the Sierra backcountry Los Angeles San Francisco and even to the home of an elderly New York benefactor with a curious influence in the affairs of the Eastern Sierra. In the end though everything leads back to the aqueduct and the enigmatic people caught up in a culture of murder.</p>