When his best friend pursuing a mythical warship dies in a North Carolina marsh, prodigious doctoral student and famed savior of Cleopatra's tomb, Qeb Morgan, is horrified. But after a mysterious sister his friend never mentioned insists her brother was murdered and begs him to finish her brother's work, stunned Qeb faces an odious choice: refuse her and finish his PhD dream; or lose everything chasing his dead friend's crazy fantasy. The haunting journal of a Civil War sailor and a sunken blockade runner bearing an unexplainable cargo quickly urge that the myth is real, making Qeb's only choice clear. Except that nothing could have braced him for the love, the lies, and the treachery that await him.