When professional ethicist Jack Waxman goes missing, his elderly father, Donald, takes the case. Donald thinks he's a hardboiled private detective, but he's just a retired writer of films and TV shows about hardboiled detectives. Jack's depressed daughter Samantha joins in the search, mainly to make sure Grandpa Donald doesn't hurt himself. Together they scour Los Angeles for leads, confronting past mistakes and making plenty of new ones. In the course of their quest, Sam struggles to achieve something like adulthood, and Donald struggles to reconcile fantasy and reality.

But where is Jack Waxman? Also, who, really, is Jack Waxman?

A degraded Odysseus for a degraded world, Jack finds himself adrift, at risk of losing his reputation, his family, and even his life. If he's going to survive, and do it with his soul intact, he has to overcome his deepest fears.

Jack's story, entwined with Sam and Donald's, is a gripping comic adventure, but it's also a meditation on how one ought to live in a world that's falling apart.