Last time it was stolen weed and knockoff designer shampoo. This time it is the seemingly trivial occurrence of a few pilfered honeybee colonies that propel former hippie and merry prankster Harry Stein into the multitrillion-dollar world of the honeybee industry. In the presence of six trillion bees to pollinate millions of acres of almond trees, Stein, who is deathly allergic to bee stings, discovers the natural catastrophe of colony collapse, and a corrupt grab by organized AGROBIZ for all of the available water in Southern California.

In his absence, Harry's daughter Angie and his woman friend Lila's very attractive seventeen-year-old stepson find an elephant tusk that has been carried in to Lila's pool on an underground seepage from the nearby La Brea Tar Pits. When the rest of the skeleton emerges, it turns out not to be the prehistoric mammoth they'd hoped it would be, but a human being who just might have been murdered in the 1920s. The perpetrator of the eighty-year-old murder is still alive and the most powerful man in Los Angeles and will do anything necessary to keep the secret hidden.