Brig Ellis is a new age private investigator with old school values. When he gets a call from an old flame seeking protection for her husband, he agrees to help. Seems the hubby is an artist whose star is ascending. What Brig doesn't know, until he makes contact with the couple, is that the artist paints with the cremated ashes of human remains.

While the painter's profile is rising, so too is the number of people less than thrilled with what he is doing?and some of them are determined to stop him one way or another. Ellis soon finds himself in the middle of multiple bizarre events that could be chalked up as accidental mayhem. Of course, they could also be escalating murder attempts. From wild art house happenings in the warehouse district to glittering soirees in the manicured mansions of the upper crust, things get more and more dangerous. A tornado in far west Texas threatens to level everything and everyone in its path. A sojourn to Havana, Cuba turns deadly. An art show in Chicago becomes a nightmare when a Molotov cocktail sets a gallery ablaze.

The violence keeps increasing exponentially, as do the suspects. There are jealous artists, shady gallery owners, reporters with hidden agendas, outraged Christian ministers, even Jewish groups who become incensed when they find that one of the artist's paintings includes the ashes of a Holocaust survivor. Ellis struggles to keep the detractors at a distance, the artist safe, and the old flame from igniting a new spark while he looks for a potential killer and wrestles with his own convictions about the moral conundrums surrounding this fascinating but questionable form of DYING ART.