Brilliant, beautiful and iconoclastic twenty-eight year-old philosophy professor Cali Shaw reluctantly returns to the raw Santa Cruz surf community in which she grew up, as a favor to her dying mentor, Professor Wilhelmina Mills, and is forced to confront the wreckage of her relationships with her childhood true love (a one-time surfing champion now struggling to stabilize his life after years of addiction) and her mother (a trailblazing community activist with misplaced resentment toward Cali). Cali’s expertise is stoicism, and the lessons she teaches her undergraduates inform her efforts to reconcile her past, while simultaneously pulling her into an FBI effort to solve a global financial crime spree that appears to be targeting Professor Mills and Cali.