Across the Silver River synopsis:

To prepare for her first assignment as a music instructor at an elementary school in San Francisco Zoey Zarkoff returns to the orphanage she was adopted from in China hoping to enhance her teaching skills while, at the same time, return some of the love and care she received as an abandoned infant 23 years earlier. She still harbors a host of questions surrounding the underbelly of China's past one-child policy and the conditions which caused her birth parents to abandon her, i.e., was she brought there out of fear or with the hopes for a better life.

Her return is celebrated by a Taoist immortal who explains that if she can recover the 130-year-old fur coat she was swaddled in when first delivered to the orphanage he will be able to reveal the secrets of her Chinese heritage.

With the help of a friend, the daughter of a U.S. Embassy diplomat, she follows a trail of deceit and greed: from the police officer who found her at a bus station and delivered her to the orphanage, but kept the coat; to a wealthy restaurateur/landowner; an old soldier intent on selling it at a flea market; and finally to the fortune teller/smuggler at a flea market (all who suffered some sort of tragedy) to recover her family heirloom.

And as promised, the Taoist immortal reveals the coat's secrets and connection to her Chinese ancestors ? intrepid matriarchs who survived centuries of cultural misogyny, war, famine, and political upheaval that include: Mao's Long March, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square ? and to her Russian ones.

But when she attempts to leave the country at the end of her volunteering stint, an airport scanner exposes a precious jewel hidden in the coat's lining and she's arrested for smuggling.

In the process of proving her innocence she uncovers a web of murder, an illegal trade in endangered wildlife, and the how this jewel, created for the last Tsar of Russia, connects her two families, thousands of miles and a century apart.