Neither marriage nor murder are on Magnus Torval’s agenda when he and his fiancé, Mariela, travel to a Cascade mountain town in Washington. But the recently retired police officer soon finds himself swept up in the rip tides of both. Mariela’s spontaneous wedding plans and his own discovery of a fresh corpse make for an unholy combination that threatens to drown their happiness and jail a beloved pastor whose fellow-believers fled religious persecution in Russia.
Along with a local policeman and a young Ukrainian woman, Magnus and Mariela are sucked into events that lead to upheaval for many and terror for some, exposing buried connections to art theft, organized crime, and brutality during the Russian-Afghan War. Tributaries of memory and action, celebration and revenge, past and present, converge in a climactic confrontation deep in the mountains.