George Gaskill, a car salesman from Indiana, goes missing from the stern deck of the Aegean Queen, leaving only a pool of blood and a strange note behind. Ollie Osgood, the husband of Dotsy Lamb's best friend Lettie, is the last person to have seen him and one of three men who lost a bundle to George in a Texas Hold'em poker game. Then the ship's photographer turns up murdered on the beautiful island of Mykonos.

Dotsy wants only to unwind and to renew her promising relationship with Marco Quattrocchi, the Carabinieri captain she met in Italy three years ago, but since Ollie is the prime suspect in George's disappearance and Marco is embroiled in the photographer's murder, she can't.

The Aegean Queen is a ship with a theme - archaeology. Dotsy strikes up a friendship with the ship's guest lecturer, famous archaeologist, Dr. Luc Girard, and introduces him to the ship's klutziest dancer, Sophie Antonakos. With the help of Lettie Osgood's amazing powers of observation, Dotsy, Sophie, and Luc discover antiquities in the ship's display cases that have been looted from museums or smuggled from their homelands.

The trails of murder and theft converge on the island of Crete, where Dotsy finds herself dodging bullets from the gun of a man she doesn't even know.