Life is good at La Buena Vida, a 55-plus community in San Juan Capistrano, California. Sunshine every day, good neighbors, a laid-back retirement vibe and open-play pickleball five days a week. Until the community's best (and least liked) player is found dead on the court, balls from the shot machine he was practicing against arrayed around him. The coroner rules death by natural causes—heat stroke, but for two of the victim's fellow pickleballers, the position of the body and the settings on the ball machine don't make sense.

     So begins the mystery that leads a group of senior friends and the victim's young widow on a search for the truth. It's a journey of deductions and danger, where the widow learns the older man she married three years earlier may have been a semi-retired hit man, and the friends discover that behind the death on court #3 lies a staggering fraud, ruthless political ambition, off-shore bank accounts hiding millions and the vestige of a deal struck 150 years ago by two men in a saloon—one who walked away with a gold mine, the other with posterity. Where death threats and break-ins violate the sanctity of their gated community and peaceful retirements. And even best friends may harbor dark secrets.