A war profiteer, a missing girl and a precious antiquity: Mickey Lynch, private eye, is up to his armpits in intrigue and murder in 1947 Oakland, California. While checking the background of a millionaire tapped for a White House job, Lynch, a former U.S. Marine and Honolulu cop, discovers a real estate scam, political corruption, drugs and treason. He crosses paths with a U.S. Marshal, two crooked FBI agents and a mysterious Brazilian who is a martial arts expert. At the same time, he has to disprove allegations he conspired to commit perjury in a "Dear John" homicide case. As his investigation proceeds, he learns one reason why 127,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up and imprisoned on the U.S. West Coast during the war, and uncovers a plot to wipe out the African-American blues and jazz scene in Bohemian West Oakland. And Lynch discovers that the object that ties all these threads together is a 600-year-old relic of feudal Japan: a funerary urn made of precious gemstone: the Jade Bone Jar