Brilliant young Oxford graduate finds it quite a culture shock to become unorthodox New England archaeology professor Sydney Fox's teaching assistant. Nigel gets his baptism by fire in her more adventurous capacity, relic hunter, when they are commissioned by villagers from Nepal who scraped together their meager coins savings to find Buddha's bowl for their new shrine to prince Siddhartha, the original Buddha. Sydney finds her rival, less scrupulous relic hunter Stewie Harper is after the same- he was hired by bumbling Chinese banker Michael Chan to find the bowl so he can save his family's bank from financial ruin. The villagers handed them a map with cryptic clues, which they solve on the road, dealing with successive dangers and their own phobias.
—KGF Vissers