Maxwell Smythe Brown IV is a smart-ass by choice. The burden of a pretentious name is under-appreciated. To deflect the taunts of his peers, Brown becomes the point person in pranks, taunts, and mischief that keep him in constant hot water with teachers, coaches, bosses and colleagues. It’s not all bad: this disregard for authority and convention helps him survive the Vietnam war. But his inability to keep his mouth shut and his fly zipped costs him his teaching job and he’s exiled to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Three hundred years earlier the great Moghul Khan Shaista abruptly abandoned his post in the same city. The Khan’s youngest and favorite daughter had succumbed to tropical disease and the grief stricken Khan returned to Shahjahanabad, but not before burying a treasure as a memorial to his daughter’s short life. For three hundred years treasure hunters have searched for the rumored treasure but Brown has an advantage. As an accessory to a pretentious name Brown has taken on a pretentious hobby: collecting antiquarian maps. Initially unaware of the importance of the information on one of his old maps, Brown sets in motion events that bring him closer to the treasure, but also attract the competitive attention of six brutal castoffs of an Indian Intelligence service. Before the dust settles, two men have been beheaded, another skinned, a bystander strangled and two more fatally shot.