"Mrs. Loretta Plansky, a recent widow in her seventies, is settling into retirement in Florida while dealing with her 98-year-old father and fielding requests for money from her beloved children and grandchildren. Thankfully, her new hip hasn't changed her killer tennis game one bit. One night Mrs. Plansky is startled awake by a phone call from a voice claiming to be her grandson Will, who desperately needs ten thousand dollars to get out of a jam....

In the near future, privileged classes live and work "Inside" cities, while non-citizens scratch out a miserable existence "Outside" in a vast desert. People cannot leave their designated zones without special visas known as "papelles." When fraudulent papelles surface, Seattle fraud investigator William Geld travels to Shanghai to ferret out the culprit and meets Maria Gonzalez ... a woman with whom he has a passionate affair, but breaks one of society's...