Ferraris' novel, set in Saudi Arabia, features desert guide Nayir al-Sharqi, who is hired by wealthy friends to find their missing daughter. When the girl turns up dead, apparently drowned in a flash flood in the desert, Nayir suspects that all is not as it seems. And as he looks into her death, he develops an uncomfortable partnership with a female technician at the local coroner's office.

After her parents are kidnapped, Emma and her best friend Herbie set out on an adventure that takes them through a galaxy populated by pirates, monkeys, the tyrant Queen of Virgo, and other creatures, human and otherwise, as they try to rescue her parents and protect the mysterious Pyxis.