Formerly the star investigator in the Anchorage D.A's office, Kate Shugak now tracks down criminals from her Aleut homestead. But she and her wolf-dog Mutt are taking a June break to pick wild morel mushrooms among the charred trees left by a devastating forest fire. In the ashes Kate also uncovers the mysterious corpse of a naked man. And when she is "hired" by a ten-year-old to locate his missing dad, she fears she has already found him. The reason how and why he died, however, is buried deeper than his body. Finding it will lead Kate to the remains of a woolly mammoth in a Fairbanks museum, back to her old lover Jack Morgan, and far afield to an isolated settlement of religious fundamentalists ... as she follows a twisted road toward a smoldering evil and the flash point for a macabre murder.