Jennifer Chambers and her dog Patch move from her perfect apartment in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to a seven-room two-story white frame farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Jenny is a city girl, and Whippoorwill Farm is not the place where she wants to spend the rest of her life alone, but she has no choice. Her fiancé talked into buying her grandparent's farm. They were going to live there as newlyweds, but it didn't happen. She bought the farm, literally, because she was in love. Bad decision.
Trying to make the old farm feel like home, when Jenny cleans the stonewalled cellar beneath the farmhouse her dog finds a small wooden box hidden under her grandfather's workbench. The box has an ivory dragon with red ruby eyes on top. It looks like a treasure from another time, another place. Such an exotic looking antique should be filled with diamonds, emeralds, and pearls, instead it's filled with old keys. Among the derelicts, Jenny finds three keys on a gold ring and an invitation to play a game with the ghost of a man, John Burkhead, a former owner who has been dead for over sixty years.
Jenny learns that Burkhead was an eccentric, a collector of antiques and rare treasures, who kept a white wolf as a pet. Locals say he was murdered by vandals searching for Egyptian artifacts. Jenny has been living in a purple funk for four long months having been betrayed by her fiancé and her best friend and she decides to play Burkhead's game of Locks and Keys because she feels she has nothing more to lose. She doesn't realize she is beginning an adventure, accepting a challenge, with unexpected consequences.
When Jenny is attacked by a burglar looking for Burkhead's rumored treasures she buys a gun to protect herself. She is armed, but she isn't sure she could pull the trigger knowing a bullet can maim or kill. When the game turns deadly, Jenny realizes that if she doesn't have the guts to defend herself and her property, she should move to a gated community.
To further complicate her life, Jenny worries about opening a lock and finding something of great value. Ethically, if she did find one of Burkhead's treasures would it belong to her, or to Burkhead's relatives, his heirs? Trying to make a decision about ownership, she locates Burkhead's cousin and forms an immediate connection with Ms. Gracie and her son Sean. Jenny trusts Sean and asks him to join her as she plays John's game. When the attraction between Jenny and Sean deepens, Jenny dreads telling him she is a 26-year-old virgin. It's the age of promiscuity. He will think she's . . . actually she doesn't know what he will think.
As Jenny plays Burkhead's ghostly game, she faces challenges that test her ingenuity, her integrity, and her courage in ways she could never have imagined. Will she win the game? Will she find all the locks that match the keys? The most important question of all . . . is she the only one playing John Burkhead's ghostly game?
