This suspense novel, alternately set in a northern California university community and in major cities of Europe, chronicles the efforts of Harry Packer to excise a guilt that has been eating at his conscience for over thirty years. While a young American cell leader in the French Resistance during World War II, he secretly executed a fellow Resistance worker who he believed had betrayed their unit to the Gestapo. Evidence later confirmed he had killed an innocent man. For thirty-three years he had looked for a way to redeem himself for this fatal error in judgment. Then, in 1976, an opportunity seems to arise for him to do ,so - by identifying and bringing to justice an unknown murderer he is convinced is also a Nazi war criminal living incognito in the United States. Complications develop when his quarry turns out also to be a Soviet KGB mole.