To escape the predations of the Nazis, a rare two-hundred-year-old Torah is quietly smuggled out of a doomed North African Jewish community in the dead of night and put aboard a ship. Eventually, it makes its way to safety across the Atlantic. Generations after the war has ended, it resides in obscurity in a small, rundown Sephardic temple in Hollywood. The peace is shattered, however, when suddenly someone tries to break in and abscond with it. Amos Parisman, a local, agnostic, aging gumshoe, is recruited to thwart the would-be burglar. This sets him off on a madcap plunge into the world of international art and antiquities, and the ruthless kind of people who will stop at nothing—not even murder—to own them. parses the difference between true wisdom and the coarse material world.