Mac comes home from a weekend fishing trip and walks right into his own funeral. On the night he was away, his apartment was annihilated by a bomb, along with a man and a young woman. Mac stays "dead" while Enright harangues a mobster who had threatened Mac, but the mobster has an alibi for the killings. Mac and a policewoman then focus on the dead woman, a student at a community college near San Francisco. She had arranged to meet someone at Mac's apartment knowing he wouldn't be there, and had brought a burly student to serve as her bodyguard (thus his corpse was misidentified as Mac's). The young woman was researching something tied to a nearby parish church founded by Catholic missionaries in the 18th century -- but what had she uncovered?
—Peter Harris