In Port City, Iowa, Mallory is a writer of detective stories, not a detective, but once again real-life crime comes to divert him from the fictional variety. In the middle of the night, he gets a call from Sheriff Brennan; the sheriff summons him to the outskirts of town to where Ginnie Mullens’s body has just been discovered.
Mallory and Ginnie had grown up together. After high school, however, Ginnie became a prototypical hippie, and when the wave of the sixties receded, she continued to live outside of convention. Ginnie made her own rules. “Best friends” since babyhood, she and Mal have grown almost completely apart. Brennan’s call now brings back a flood of old memories, old resentments, old regrets to Mallory.
The sheriff is not satisfied that Ginnie. as it appears, has killed herself; he suspects murder. Unable to act on his suspicion officially, he asks Mallory to sec what he can learn from the people Ginnie has been involved with. Soon, Mal finds himself questioning ex-flower children whose adjustment to the eighties has been to overlay activities like dope dealing with the material trappings of middle-class life.
Mallory also encounters Ginnie’s ex-partner and ex-lover, who has bought out her successful boutique; her estranged husband, a gentle poet who is caring for their four-year-old little girl; and some high school classmates in whom the fifteen years has made drastic changes — some for the better.
In his search for the real reason behind Ginnie’s death. Mallory comes to see that the dreams of the children of Aquarius have died. What he doesn’t expect to find is the cause of a very immediate threat to his own life as well.
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