When a troubled young runaway arrives on Tom Ripley's French estate, he is drawn into a world he thought he'd left behind: the seedy underworld of Berlin, with its kidnapping plots, lies and deception. Frank Pierson, son a wealthy American family, has traced Tom Ripley to his home in France. Frank has committed a crime - a murder - and senses that Tom, not above the odd killing himself, is the best person to shelter him. Ripley becomes the boy's protector and a friendship develops between the young man with a guilty conscience and the older one with no conscience at all.