Dr. David Hart, a brilliant researcher and physician, is found brutally murdered in his luxurious home in an affluent Los Angeles suburb. Detective Marla Stapleton investigates the murder, which appears to have sexual undertones. But as she talks with the people who knew David, the complexities of his life and death begin to unfold. Marla races against time when she realizes that she is on the trail of a sadistic, psychopathic killer. Eventually, Marla suspects that the motive behind David's murder may relate to events that took place a long time ago and a continent away in the Nazi death camp at Treblinka, Poland. The truth about these events is buried in the memories of the captive and captor caught in the cataclysm of the Holocaust. The search for David's killer extends from suburban Los Angeles to the Californian high desert, from the balmy shores of Tel Aviv to the snow-capped mountains of Aspen, and even to the heart of darkness, Treblinka. The Patron is about the inability to escape the past, which holds the present as hostage. It is about the instinct to survive captivity, whether held captive in an extermination camp or in an abandoned house in California. It is about the permanence of love that time cannot erase.