Upon learning of his father's death, Nick Hughes returns to his childhood home in Pennsylvania to settle the estate, only to find more than he bargained for. Buried in his late father's files are documents from an investigation firm hired to locate Nick's older brother who hasn't been heard from in over twenty years. The documents reveal that his brother served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia and never returned. However, when Nick contacts the Peace Corps, their records contradict this, showing his brother never actually took the assignment in Malaysia.

Thus begins an odyssey that will take Nick to the other side of the globe and one of Asia's last wild places - the island of Borneo, where an elusive group of nomadic forest people struggle against a far-off government seeking to crush them and bury their rainforest under millions of gallons of water behind a massive hydro-electric dam funded by the World Bank. There he's drawn ever deeper into a murky world of deception and misdirection where nothing is what it seems, events surge toward a cataclysmic head and Nick must finally confront ancient and devastating truths surrounding his past, himself, and the lies we tell ourselves to survive.