Mick and Carol are hired by Peter Pettanko, a Wall Street billionaire who lives in a mansion on a private estate on the Connecticut coast. Peter Pettanko is married to Titiana Prosperosa, a glamorous fashion model who has gone missing. He wants Titiana found – discretely. As Mick is leaving the Pettanko estate, he sees the beautiful Titiana arriving in her Porsche, hair waving in the breeze, with a bald Tibetan monk as her passenger. The monk came with Titiana to try to negotiate a deal with Peter. That night, with the monk staying at the mansion, Peter Pettanko mysteriously dies. The monk and his brother run the Beta Sigma retreat in upstate New York, which Mick and Carol suspect is a front for several other things besides meditation. Mick’s talents are sought in figuring out how Pettanko died, who the monk is, and where Titiana had gone. This leads to the great world of Western art, where masterpieces are stolen from top museums with help from their curators. The stolen art is sold into a growing Chinese market for the very wealthy. (This is a REAL market today.) We learn that Peter Pettanko’s butler “Jeeves” is a Chinaman who speaks with a British accent. His real name is Ji Gong (who was a Buhddist monk having supernatural powers), and he’s both an excellent chef, and a scholar of Western art. The various clues that Mick and Carol unearth lead them to Palm Springs, California, where Mick meets a mystery contact, two miles above the sweltering desert on the snow-covered peak of San Jacinto Mountain. There, Mick makes a deal to trade in stolen art – at least until he can learn more. Back in New York City, Mick and Carol make a deal for a famous painting by Degas, which leads to a brutal assassination at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This helps Mick and Carol tie some of the thefts to one of the victims. This finally leads them to a character who hides in plain view in Times Square dressed as a Viking, posing for photos and collecting money from tourists, and wearing a helmet with two horns. The horns represent the two ways that the reader could interpret the final murder. To express this concept, the book both begins and ends with the same line: “Life depends a lot on how you look at things.”