An up-and-coming actress dies while surfing, apparently from an obscure medieval poison. But how was it administered? When Burke is faced with an unfamiliar milieu, he sends Tim undercover as a surfer. The victim's grasping mother, a famous novelist, the one-armed owner of a beachfront bar, not one but two bikini-clad young women, and the owner of a surf shop, who had been having an affair with the victim, all come under suspicion. A speargun shoots a little too close to home before the killer is finally uncovered.