Gretchen Birch recently moved back to Phoenix after breaking up with her boyfriend, Steve Kuchen, in Boston. She works in her mother's doll workshop repairing dolls. With her mother on the West Coast promoting her newly released book, Gretchen prepares for her first "solo" doll show. She attends an auction, bids on and wins a box of Ginny dolls. Gretchen is given the wrong box of dolls. Confident the boxes simply got mixed up, Gretchen obtains the name and address of, Duanne Wilson, whom she believes has her box of Ginny dolls. Meanwhile she's stuck with his box of the cheaper Kewpie dolls.

Brett Wesley, the auctioneer's assistant, is hit by a car and lies dead in the road. No one noticed him step in front of the car and Gretchen later finds an anonymous note saying "He was pushed".

When Gretchen goes to Duanne Wilson's home, she finds no such address and no one around has ever heard of a Duanne Wilson.

The annoying reporter, Ronny Beam, is found murdered at the doll show. The problem is, he's been stabbed in the back with Gretchen's "marked with her identity" workshop knife. It has her fingerprints all over it. Is someone trying to set her up?

Then she begins receiving packages; each containing a Kewpie doll with a note hidden inside of it. The notes don't make any sense. Gretchen attempts to solve this mystery by figuring out what all these clues mean.

An attempt at harm is made on Gretchen's three pound poodle, Nimrod. Gretchen kicks it into high gear to put the pieces of this mysterious puzzle together and find the culprit.

Ronny wrote his last inflammatory article and Brett worked his last auction. What secret did they share? And how did it tie them together? Were their murders linked to the murder of a Kewpie doll collector in Boston? They must all be connected in some way, but how?

Gretchen is thrust into this nightmare of a mystery, all because she mistakenly went home with the wrong box of dolls at an auction. How on earth does this box of Kewpie dolls fit into this mystery?