"Prague, several years after the war, has been consumed by its Communist oppressors. Private enterprise is being eliminated. The secret police have begun to follow in the footsteps of their masters, the KGB. Show trials of “enemies of the state” have become a macabre form of popular entertainment. And Alex’s employers at the Gehlen Organization are anxious for inside information from behind this particularly nasty bit of the Iron Curtain. So, Alex returns to Czechoslovakia for the first time in decades – to seek that inside information on the Communist regime but also to reunite with the family he left as a teenager. The relationships are somewhere between tenuous and nonexistent, but Alex figures it might be his last chance – and he soon discovers a secret that tests the very heart of what family means."