At fifty years of age Lawrence is at a crossroads. An expert in probability and statistics, he finds himself confronted by a combination of improbable events: his wife Rachel has left him and his close friend John is dead. He abandons his home in Los Angeles and moves to a small house in the mountains above Albuquerque, New Mexico. There he delves into his past, searching for kernels of insight much as a miner might search for nuggets of gold. Aided by his occasional lover Miranda, his daughter Abigail, and his shrink Angel, he struggles to connect his disparate memories into a coherent narrative that he hopes will help him understand the changes that hazard has brought to his life. Along the way he discovers that the truth can be as elusive as the Seven Cities of Cíbola, the mythical land sought by Coronado when he, too, came to New Mexico more than four hundred years before.
In the words of one reviewer, Searching for Cibola describes: "the natural dialectal evolution of individuals interacting with each other and with happenstance . . . Beautifully written"