On the morning of 22 December 2000, Joop Koopman, a 47-year-old, moderately success-ful Dutch-born scriptwriter in Los Angeles, congratulates his daughter Mirjam on her 17th birthday. He has arranged to meet an old school friend, Philip van Gelder, for lunch. Van Gelder wants to recruit Joop for the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, with the job of spying on a Moroccan suspected of being connected with the planning of terror acts. During their conversation the phone rings: Mirjam has had an accident on her way to her birthday party. Twenty hours later, his beloved daughter is dead. But Joop is not given a chance to abandon himself to his grief. A series of fateful events turn the life of the unhappy Joop upside-down: a huge coloured man called God, on whose motor-cycle Mirjam had her accident, refuses to leave his side; Joop feels an inexplicable liking for the Moroccan he is supposed to be spying on; and when his cousin Linda, whom he has not seen for thirty years, suddenly appears in Los Angeles with a Tibetan monk, Koopman does not know what to think or who is writing the script: a madman, a clever swindler or a hidden divine hand? De Winter's boldest novel to date: human tragedy, metaphysical speculation, physics-related theories, political espionage and greed for profit enter into an explosive combination that guarantees superb entertainment and food for thought.