Miranda Brooks grew up in the stacks of her eccentric uncle Billy's bookstore, solving the inventive scavenger hunts he created just for her. On Miranda's twelfth birthday, Billy has a falling-out with her mother and disappears from Miranda's life. Sixteen years later she receives news that Billy has died and left her Prospero Books, which is teetering on bankruptcy -- and one final scavenger hunt. Home in Los Angeles, Miranda finds clues that Billy has hidden for her inside novels on the store's shelves, in locked drawers of his apartment upstairs, in the name of the store itself. She is drawn into a journey where she meets people whose stories reveal a history that Miranda's mother has kept hidden -- and the terrible secret that tore her family apart.