During World War II, the Nazis invade a Greek village and kill all its inhabitants. Years later, an American writer named Jackson Ripaldo, at the request of a friend, travels to Greece, and then to Austria, to find out what really happened. With the help of a tormented woman, an old journal, and a former Wehrmacht officer, he discovers the truth, which is even more shocking than anyone had thought. This novel is by a well-known scholar and translator of 20th-century Greek poetry.