Harvard historian Peter Fallon investigates a university legend about an original Shakespeare manuscript that may have survived the Harvard Hall fire of 1764.

"Can I interest you in saving America?" That's the message Peter Fallon receives from a Wall Street bigwig. It's not a challenge he can turn down, especially since the country is in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The stock market is wobbling. The Chinese have stopped buying T-bills. If we don't get control of our deficit, our economic future looks grim. But all my not be lost.

Boston rare-book dealer Peter Fallon and his girlfriend, Evangeline Carrington, are headed to California, where their search for a lost journal takes them into the history of Gold Rush. The journal follows young James Spencer, of the Sagamore Mining Company, on a spectacular journey from staid Boston, up the Sacramento River to the Mother Lode. During his search for a "lost river of gold," Spencer confronts vengeance, greed, and racism in himself...