A HIGHLY ACCLAIMED, RIVETING DRAMAA HAUNTING PICTURE OF AMERICACould two people be more enviable than Richard and Helen Bittenberg? They love each other, have two healthy, intelligent children, and are financially comfortable. Richard is at the top of his profession. They live in a desirable neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the capital of the most powerful nation in the world with its culturally rich and cosmopolitan atmosphere. Yet Richard is distraught. It seems to him that perverse, irresponsible forces are destroying the country he loves. Troubled by his powerlessness, he seizes a daunting, wholly unexpected opportunity to act. He is drawn into tense, sometimes harrowing circumstances that tax his conscience, courage, and endurance to the utmost. Helen worries about his increasingly stressed condition, but she does not know its real cause. Suddenly, she finds herself in the middle of a nightmare of her own. Helen and Richard must independently handle grueling ordeals, one involving secret political machinations, one involving an agonizing police investigation. The narrative keeps tightening its grip on the reader. The milieus of the novel are Washington, D.C., Paris and environs, and Charleston, South Carolina. Though intensely suspenseful, this is no ordinary thriller. An absorbing moral drama with an epic dimension, it forms a trenchant, thought-provoking commentary on the state of America and the Western world. This novel has received very high praise. It has been compared to the fiction of George Santayana, Thomas Mann, and Gore Vidal, as well as to Whittaker Chambers's autobiographical classic, Witness.CLAES G. RYN was born and raised in Sweden but has lived in Washington, D.C., for most of his adult life. He is Professor of Politics and former chairman of his department at the Catholic University of America and is the author of a number of scholarly books. He has taught also at Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, and Louisiana State University. His teaching and writing focus on ethics and politics, politics and culture, and the history of Western political thought. A frequent visitor to China, he gave the Distinguished Foreign Scholar Lectures at Beijing University in 2000 and is Honorary Professor at Beijing Normal University.