As our story opens, a career conflict has separated McGee and his latest lady love. Meyer, meanwhile, is all jumpy from his encounter with Sideshow...I mean, Dirty Bob, in the last novel. Things are starting to look like the final season of Cheers around the McGee estate. As if it couldn't get worse, when Meyer lends the John Maynard Keynes to his niece Norma for her honeymoon, she is killed when the houseboat explodes at sea. Was someone after Norma...or Meyer? The trail leads first to Texas, to pin down the identity of a particularly nasty serial killer, then to Mexico to foil his latest design, where a Mayan girl's skin gives the novel its title, and entrances Travis. Just for the record, McGee switched hardcover publishers for this next-to-last novel, from Lippincott to Harper and Row.