Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, arrives in Vietnam in 1965 in search of answers about her brother's death and a cure for her restlessness, and becomes so addicted to the war and caught up in the lives of two men, that she finds it difficult to leave when Saigon falls ten years later.

San Francisco detective Lindsay Boxer has only the cryptic message written in lipstick on a car windshield as evidence from the brutal shooting of a mother and her child as they were returning to their car in a mall parking garage, and things become complicated when an empty safe is discovered along with the body of an popular actor.