Welcome to the Los Padres National Forest. A vacation from hell. Can Alex and Jason survive? In this sequel to The Geography of Murder, Santa Barbara Homicide detective Alexander Spider and his lover of seven months, Jason Zachary are still struggling to make their intense but troubled love affair work. To this end Jason talks city boy Alex into a hiking trip in Los Padres National Forest, something Alex has never done. Only his love for Jason makes him agree. Spider is not an outdoor type guy but for Jason he will go. His first introduction to 'roughing it' is fraught with humorous horrors. Then during an arduous backwoods hike the pair stumble on the decaying bodies of missing hikers, the most recent one barely cold. They were hikers killed for stumbling onto a major grow-op hidden in the vast wilderness. Now Alex and Jason are in a race for their lives.