In the early afternoon of July 25, 2000, an Air France Concorde take off from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris struck a nine inch metal strip on the runway. Seventeen seconds later, the world's only supersonic passenger airliner, the preferred transport of royalty and celebrities and capable of flying faster than a speeding bullet, careened out of control and crashed, killing in a ball of fire all 109 terrified men, women, children and crew on board. Now twenty years later, law graduate Judy Alexander attempts to solve a recent puzzling and notorious murder and follows clues which lead her to revisit the events of the Concorde tragedy. In her quest for justice she much ask herself the existential question first posed by Thornton Wilder in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual's own will?