Maddy Sprowls gets to The Hannawa Herald-Union on the stroke of nine. She makes her first mug of Darjeeling tea and settles down at her desk to read the obituaries. The obits are the best part of her day, she admits. But not today. First she reads that her old college friend Gordon Sweet is dead. Then she learns he was murdered - at the abandoned landfall where the eccentric archaeology professor was conducting his latest dig. And just like that, the cranky 68-year-old newspaper librarian finds herself investigating another murder. No, two murders! Gordon's death just might be linked to the grisly bludgeoning of state wrestling champ David Delarosa fifty years earlier. And so begins a harrowing and hilarious trek back to Maddy's old beatnik days, when she was a member of the Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society. Legendary beat writer Jack Kerouac still casts a long shadow over the group. And there's a coffee house full of quirky suspects to consider: Poet Chick Glass, saxophonist Shaka Bop, free-thinking Effe Fredmansky, snooty Gwen Mofftt-Stumpf, and toxic waste dumper Kenneth Kingzette, just to name a few.