Threatened with the ending of his teaching career unless he publishes scholarly work soon, Dawson Goldsmith embarks of writing a literary biography of his uncle, who became a successful and noteworthy novelist after a career in journalism. He discovers that his uncle was a man with secrets that not only determined the course of his life and his early death. That knowledge jolted Dawson out of the tranquility of his sheltered life into a world of danger that required fortitude and action unlike anything required of his before.