In 1933, Samuel Beauchamp awoke on an isolated dirt road, confused by his surroundings. Rows of citrus trees flanked either side, and a pipe-smoking man stood leaning on a pickup's hood, gazing toward a pair of motionless feet sticking up from a ditch. The feet belonged to a dead boy, Samuel discovered, and when he approached the onlooker by the truck, he found himself drawn inside the man's body, seeing through his eyes, tasting the tobacco in his mouth, and in full control of muscles and limbs. Though lacking any memory of that place or those people, Samuel would eventually come to grasp the scene - he was the boy in the ditch, murdered at age seventeen by his stepfather. This wasn't the day Samuel died, it was the day he was reborn as something else - a seemingly immortal entity with a whole world of bodies at his disposal. Samuel doesn't take his unique ability lightly. He spends the next twenty-five years studying the phenomena, only moving to new bodies when absolutely necessary, and always resettling in new cities. His conservative nature and discretion enable him to live fairly normal lives, until an ill-fated selection in 1956: a vicious biker known as Tinker. Despite his efforts to "clean up" the new body - moving from Kansas to New York City, landing a quiet job as a librarian, and enrolling in college - Samuel discovers that one can never truly escape the past. As he begins thriving in New York, Samuel meets the beautiful and brash Eileen, a mercurial woman with a sailor's mouth and an often-exhausting sex addiction (Samuel's best friend, Stan, doesn't see how this is a problem). A year into their tumultuous relationship, Eileen disappears, and the police begin investigating Tinker's illicit past. Robbery, kidnapping, assault, attempted murder, manslaughter ... Why would detectives bother looking any further? When all hope seems lost for this body and life, a peculiar attorney surfaces, offering help, and not only does the strange man seem to know where Eileen is, he may also understand even more about Samuel than Samuel himself.