Mid October 1995 in Baltimore City, the work week starts off pleasantly enough, sunny, unseasonably warm, as though mocking the pervasive mood of fear and anxiety over crime and the economy. The number of shootings is so high, rumor has it the police are running out of crime scene tape. In spite of a national economic upturn, the city continues to hemorrhage jobs--white collar jobs--as corporations downsize or move to the suburbs. Tuesday morning, Howard Carlton Nobel, Jr., president and chief executive officer of Baltech, Inc., a computer technologies firm in downtown Baltimore, is found dead in his office, his head cut off by his own samurai sword, a memento of his trip to Tokyo.

Detectives Isaacson and Burns find themselves wandering through a bureaucratic maze of corporate downsizing, politics, greed, sex, lies, and one curious videotape. Though they uncover hard evidence and many leads, the reality of the CEO's character and the details of his death remain elusive. Was he a modern businessman, or a man obsessed with bushido, the medieval code of the samurai warrior? Was he a charismatic, effective leader, or a man fearful of his subordinates' superior knowledge and abilities? Was his death just one more senseless killing of a businessman in downtown Baltimore? Or was his demise a perverse fulfillment of the CEO's own quest to find his soul?