Ned Sheehan, a long-suffering archaeologist, has spent years hacking through the jungles of southern Mexico with little more to show for it than a few broken Maya pots. But his luck takes a dramatic – and dangerous – turn when he uncovers two tombs whose occupants are an ocean away from where they should be. One belongs to Xu Fu, a famous Taoist priest who disappeared on a quest for the elixir of immortality at the behest of China’s First Emperor. The other houses the emperor’s own mother, scandalously revealed to have been Xu Fu’s lover.
 
For Sheehan, this is huge: proof at last of transoceanic links between the ancient civilizations of China and the Maya. But to his dismay, news of the elixir is all anyone cares about. It attracts myriad sorts of dangerous crazies, from New Age crackpots to religious cults and tomb robbers in league with a Mexican drug cartel. All of them believe the tomb’s clay tablets – the priest’s enigmatic and often bawdy memoir – might contain the secret to the long-sought elixir. Soon, assassins are chasing after Sheehan and his female Chinese colleague, Li Siqin. It is only when the 2,250-year-old tablets are stolen that Sheehan and Li realize that the monk’s writings may hold the clue as to who is hunting them. This modern-day detective story is woven into Xu Fu’s own account of how he was plucked from a celibate life in a monastery to sail across the Pacific Ocean in search of Penglai, the fabled Isle of the Immortals. Instead, he lands among the fierce Maya.