The smart and savvy Rachel Gold has established herself in Chicago legal circles as a tough litigator, and a discreet counselor when a client faces an 'awkward situation.' The odd disappearance and messy suicide of Stoddard Anderson, the managing partner of Rachel's former firm, certainly qualifies as an 'awkward situation,' especially since the only way Anderson's widow can collect insurance proceeds is to prove that his death was an accident, and the only way a suicide can be an 'accident' is if the decedent was clinically insane at the time of his death. And thus Rachel Gold is retained to represent the widow, but she soon discovers that the supposedly stodgy Stoddard Anderson was into some decidedly unstodgy activities-sexual and otherwise. Incredibly, he may have actually located Montezuma's Executor, a legendary treasure linked to a series of grisly deaths dating back to the last Aztec emperor himself. With her best buddy, Benny Greenberg, in tow, Rachel sets off in search of both the Aztec treasure and a trail of evidence suggesting Stoddard Anderson's demise was not a suicide but a homicide. Rachel soon learns that she is not the only one in pursuit of Montezuma's Executor-and that she could be the next one to die for it.