The year is 1970. When U.S. Army Capt. Howard Starling is caught in the arms of another man, his commanding officer, Lt.-Col. Christopher Huygens, he’s dismissed from the service in disgrace. With a background in intelligence, he tries in desperation to make a living as a private eye. His first client, Lorna Sutter, is a wealthy woman who wants to find a young girl with whom she grew up in an orphanage. As Howard investigates, not only does he discover that the orphanage was the epicenter of a series of horrific crimes, but his past as a Cold War intelligence officer is about to catch up to him in the form of a Soviet agent whom he had helped turn, and who has once again changed employers; this time, he’s with a shadowy organization with a strange connection to his vanished lover. Nothing is as it seems, and the past is never dead, in this titillating thriller from best-selling novelist William Kowalski.