Alisa Sharpe is a woman with a history, who is currently working as a private investigator with Terry Grossman Investigations. Her assignment is to answer the question: Did James Monroe Taeggardt commit suicide, as the ME ruled, or was he gunned down during a robbery, as Taeggardt's sister adamantly claims? Alisa meets Tuxedo, the cat, who helps her find a stash of twelve cassette tapes hidden in a hidey-hole. Why so many tapes? Why are they hidden? As Alisa listens to the tapes she discovers they are full of news, weather, sports, and trivia, with frequent quotations from famous authors as well as frequent Biblical quotations. Are the tapes a code? Are they a message? As Alisa digs deeper, she suddenly learns there are nefarious people who do not want her digging up their stories.