When Amy Hawkins, a young dot-com executive from California who has made her fortune at the top of the NASDAQ, overhears a pair of elderly - and thus much wiser - socialities decry the new generation for their incompetence in all things worldly, she sets off for Europe to find culture, her roots, and maybe a cause to devote her considerable fortune to. Amy strats her quest at one of the finest small hotels in the French Alps - a hotel noted for skiing and its famous cooking lessons - in the town of Valmeri. A few days into her trip, Amy is nearly swept away by an avalanche (strated, some say, by low-flying American warplanes). Two of the hotel's guests, esteemed English publisher Adrian Venn and his much younger American wife, Kerry, were not as fortunate as Amy. Both lie comatose in a nearby hospital. Learning that French and English laws dicate a very different division of money depending on where Adrian dies, Adrian's children - young, old, legitimate, and illegitimate - assemble in Valmeri to protect theit interests should he not pull through. Amy, already suspects as an American, finds that her nationality freezes the soicial climate as she steps in to assist the family. In her innocence, Amy sets in motion a series of events in France and England that spotlight anicent national differences, customs, and laws. Add one or two small affairs that may topple carefully balliances, and soon it is, as French say, a situation.