Changing Hands is the tale of one opal ring that makes its way through several centuries in the hands of vastly different owners. Multi-layered characters exchange ownership while slices of history dominate their survival and subsequent fate.

The story begins in the mid-1700s when James Newcomb Sr., traveling across the English countryside, ignores warnings by the locals and purchases a silver jewelry box containing exotic jewelry, one of which is a magnificent opal ring. Upon his death, the book journeys to the home of an eccentric artist and the opal's strange arrival. Love and deception lead the reader to the Arctic Ocean aboard an expedition following the transit of Venus.

Cast in the shadows of love, morality, and greed, the book follows a story thread from one character to another in a span of several centuries. However, the appeal of the novel is not the reader following one person and exiting to another, but rather the following of an idea: the idea that humans in all times and locations are powerfully enticed and seduced by something we can never possess.