Karissa’s friend, a cop for the Cincinnati P.D., tells her about art theft back in her hometown of New Orleans. Having been dumped again by her boyfriend inspires Karissa to make a life change. Doing a story on art thieves in the Big Easy sounds like a great idea, especially as way to escape the frozen North. She convinces J.J. to use his semester break to accompany her to Louisiana for “a week in the sun” where she can tour some galleries and conduct her one-woman investigation. She goes nowhere fast. However, one sympathetic contact named Soogi at the Times-Picayune encourages her. A chance meeting with a man named Paul Gomme in a jazz bar leads to an invitation to play a chess match with a teenaged prodigy sponsored by a man named Devereaux, a wealthy art patron, and at his manor house near the bayou. What Karissa and J.J. don’t realize until J.J. is engaged in a game with the boy that this match is for serious money, and he’d better not lose. Devereaux operates a theft ring and Gomme is one of his associates. Karissa takes advantage of Devereaux’s temporary absence to look around his house and she finds in an upstairs room a collection of art that she knows immediately is stolen. One of the pieces is a famous rococo work held by a private collector, whose mansion was recently looted. When J.J. wins the match and Karissa’s snooping is caught on tape, the two are in for a world of trouble. Devereaux’s “personal assistant” is an ex-Special Forces soldier, and he is told by Devereaux to take them at gunpoint to a gardening shed in the back of the house, tie them up, and wait for his return. The plan is to dump their bodies in an alligator-infested swamp. J.J. and Karissa escape into the swamp before Devereaux can issue the kill order to his thug. They encounter a variety of people, good and bad, while they make their way back to their motel. but Karissa will persist until she discovers where that Rococo masterpiece has been hidden.