Soma County

When a beautiful woman dies at a California vineyard, astrologer Axel Crowe divines this was no accident. Although the police at first assume a tainted pinot noir, Crowe suspects an exotic poison.

With her best friend dead and her vineyard’s reputation in jeopardy, Crowe’s client urges him to ferret out the guilty from among a cast of immigrant workers, competing vintners and old Napa money with criminal connections.

The nexus of intrigue is a developer bent on turning the Napa Valley into a bedroom community for San Francisco. Megawati is a little person who’s surrounded himself with bodyguards, female wrestlers and fighting dogs, all attack-trained and larger than life.

In search of the vineyard’s missing foreman, Crowe teams up with a Bay Area activist who suspects kidney harvesting lies behind a local epidemic of missing persons. But the black market in body parts is international, and when Crowe follows a trail of evidence to an ashram in India, he discovers the fruit of karma is often bittersweet.