Lily, a librarian with a bookmobile, arrives in the small California town of Nolan to help start a book club. Across the ocean in an Alsatian chateau, the ancient Book of Cures is stolen and surreptitiously travels to a California coast library, then on to Nolan. Suspicion swirls around the three lonely club members. Unaware of the theft, they secretly pursue their curiosity about classical erotica while sipping a strange tea infused with herbs grown in a gypsy garden. Mysterious events collide in a whirlwind of intrigue. A crime wave and a murder shake up the town, and the women fall deeper and deeper into a baffling puzzle of danger and death.