Joe Tracy has had more lives than most men. He flew for the Navy. He played a detective for five years on a New York soap opera called Edge of Hope. Then his wife, Holly, was murdered, and when the police let the case go cold, Joe went after her killers himself and came closer to becoming one than he likes to remember. Now he lives in a hangar at a small California airport, eats too many slices of Twyla's pie at the Barnstormers, and is trying to make a living as a private investigator, with or without the paperwork. His first real client arrives in a black Jaguar. Angel Robillard is from Los Angeles, married to money and afraid of something she will not name. She wants Joe to find a truck driver named Freddie Collins and get back a videotape before anyone else sees it. It sounds simple. It is not. Freddie ends up in intensive care, Joe ends up face down in the dirt, and Angel disappears. A polished lawyer arrives with an offer that sounds a lot like a threat, a man in a black Lincoln keeps smiling at Joe from across the street, and every clue leads back to Dutch Thompkins, an engineer who died in a helicopter crash fifteen years ago, just before he could tell anyone what he knew about Santa Carmella's water. To find Angel and finish what Dutch started, Joe will need Miles, Twyla, a borrowed boat, a Cessna and every bit of nerve he has left. Some people fall. Some people fly. Joe Tracy is about to find out which kind he is.
