A lawyer unearths deadly secrets reaching back to the Napoleonic era in this "masterful contribution to the literature of international dirty work" ( The New Yorker).
Former WWII bomber pilot George Cary has a promising postwar career ahead of him as a newly minted lawyer, though his first assignment at his prestigious Philadelphia law firm isn't exactly glamorous. He's been tasked with going through the copious, dusty files on the Schneider Johnson case, in which the search for an heir to a family fortune yielded no results.
When Cary discovers something despite the dead ends and false claims, it leads him to Europe where he begins to unravel a twisting, secret history. Soon, Cary is drawing connections between a deserter from Napoleon's defeated army to a guerrilla fighter in post-war Greece. Determined to pursue the whole truth, Cary finds himself in a dangerous situation where survival depends more on his military experience than anything he learned in law school.