Rick, a fourteen-year-old foster child, escapes from a juvenile detention facility near Las Vegas and travels to Canyonlands National Park in Utah, where he meets a bird biologist working on a project to reintroduce condors to the wild.

It's a summer of sizzling heat in Charlotte where Dr. Temperance Brennan, forensic anthropologist for the North Carolina medical examiner, looks forward to her first vacation in years. A romantic vacation. She's almost out the door when the bones start appearing. A newborn's charred remains turn up in a woodstove. A small plane crashes in a North Carolina cornfield on a sunny afternoon. Both pilot and passenger are burned beyond recognition. And what...

While she studies condors in the Grand Canyon, a scientist's life is threatened, and the strange, hostile, teenage computer whiz in her family's foster care might be involved.