When the poet Eleanor Brandon dies, an apparent suicide, Peter Forrest, her former student, sometime lover and now a married professor, is asked to be her literary executor. He agrees, although he makes it clear that he is only interested in bringing her poetry to publication, not in dealing with the messy legacy of her social activism on behalf of Chinese dissidents. But after a trip to China, where he and his wife are in the process of adopting a third Chinese orphan, Peter finds himself drawn into not only the politics so dear to Eleanor, but a life-threatening plot.