Joe Gallagher, who specializes in finding missing persons, is hired by one of the owners of Precision Import/Export to find the owner's missing partner, Leonard S. Cole. Cole had set up a meeting with the thief of some computer processing chips, who was finally arrested. This left Cole with some of the sophisticated chips in his possession. He had been allowed to keep some of the chips by the manufacturer as a finder's fee. He wants to sell them, but the backers of the original theft want them as well, and will stop at nothing to get a return on their investment. In the beginning, no one knows about the backers of the theft; therefore, Gallagher believes that he is about to undertake one of the easiest jobs he has ever had. However, violence soon appears and the road ahead is littered with murder and tragedy.
J. J. Morgan was born in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri in 1940. He enlisted in the US Army in 1961 and served 17 months in pre-Kaddafi Libya as a topographic surveyor, spending much of his time living in a tent in the Sahara Desert. The remainder of his tour was spent at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. After leaving the Army in 1964, he worked as a surveyor for the US Forest Service and the California Department of Transportation. He obtained a degree in biological sciences and was employed as a fishery biologist by NOAA Fisheries for thirty years, working on the management of Pacific and Western Pacific Fisheries. As of 2013, he has been married for 47 years and has 2 children. Since 2003, he has spent several days every month hiking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, an endeavor he plans to pursue until he gets old.