A journalist, researching an autocrat’s murky background, uncovers the tragic past of his own family. Life has not been going too well lately for newspaperman Tim Fortune: while reporting the war in Bosnia, he was wounded and trapped for several days in the cellar of a shattered hotel. Back home in England, the shrapnel is removed easily enough but the psycho- logical trauma is a much more stubborn problem. And to make matters worse, his journalist wife Linda divorces him. He dreads sleep because of his nightmares, and he avoids everyone except his two old pals from school, Bucky and Mal. Then Linda, who is now a Features Editor on the newspaper, offers him an assignment to write a profile of Rudof Blac for the Sunday magazine. Not much is known about Blac; a shadowy figure, successful in many fields, his new goal appears to be political power. In a brief interview, Blac tells Tim that they both went to the same school. Tim’s research, beginning at his old school, seems to trigger a sequence of suspicious events: evidence disappears, accidents occur, people inconveniently die. It suggests to Tim that something terrible is hidden in Blac’s past – perhaps rape and murder. Increasingly, his own early life seems entangled with that of Blac. Is he investigating Blac? Or is he searching for his long-lost mother and baby sister? The answer, when it comes, proves to be as bad as his very worst nightmare.