On a hot August day, Keith Landry returns to his small home town after twenty-five years as an Intelligence Officer. He was at the Berlin Wall when it fell; his job is over. The town is different but the same; it’s people as descent or depraved as in any other society. It’s as good a place as any to seek catharsis. He’s a middle-aged man who wants peace, not trouble.
Yet trouble takes the shape of his high school and college lover, Annie Baxter. For twenty years they’ve written to each other - sweet innocuous letters full of fact and local detail - but when they meet again, by chance on the street, their six-year-long love affair of decades ago is to be their salvation and damnation. Annie is married to the town police chief, a man of violent jealousy, bitter possessiveness. He is dangerous, but, then, so is Landry.