His name is Salvador Carriscant and thus begins Kay Fischer's journey into the past of this beguiling and seductive older man who claims to be her father. A young architect, struggling to establish her career in Los Angeles in the 1930s, Kay is initially resistant and skeptical. But, increasingly, she finds herself trammeled up in his concerns and is enlisted by him in a bizarre quest that has its origins in the Philippines, in Manila, in 1902. As he begins slyly to confide in her she comes to learn about the extraordinary central event in Carriscant's life, a love affair of uncommon intensity, and, at the same time, a baffling and compelling mystery of murder and mutilation, rivalry and betrayal, surgery, flying machines and crystallized violets.