On the eve of World War II, "just another little murder" in New York City draws two vastly different men, an American detective and a German intelligence officer, into the gathering storm. One of hundreds of simple homicides each year, indistinguishable from any other in 1938 was the death of a spinster nurse killed in her apartment. A suspect is caught and convicted. Fintan Dunne, the P.I. lured onto the case and coerced by conscience into unraveling the complex setup that has put an innocent man on death row, will quickly discover that this is a murder with tentacles that stretch far beyond the crime scene, to Nazi Germany, in fact. Following it to the end leads him into a murder conspiracy of a scope that defies imagination.