The third Charlotte Diamond Mystery Retired FBI senior investigator Charlotte Diamond finds herself jetting from murder on one coast of the United States to kidnapping on another in attempts to save both her lover and her former husband. Charlotte follows her new-found companion, the leading movie actress, Brenda Brandon, to Hollywood. Brenda had abruptly abandoned Hollywood and the movies and returned to her hometown of Hopewell on the Choptank, on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. But a cameo movie role she cannot turn down returns her to the scene of an old murder, for which she now is the leading suspect. Barely having dealt with that mystery on the West Coast, Charlotte is called back to Ocean City, Maryland, where her former husband and his new gambling casino have been targeted by the mob, and his new wife kidnapped. Torn from West Coast to East Coast and thrown into the sphere of an even older and brighter flame than her former husband just when she had thought that her life was settling down, Charlotte is finding out that retirement looks a whole lot similar to when she was working on all cylinders at the FBI