In 1991 a fifty-year-old Englishman, Daniel Weiss, has come to Jerusalem to bury his mother, Esta Weiss, and to see what he can find out about the father he never knew. What he uncovers is the dramatic story of the life of Esta Weiss.

In 1941, Esta, a young Jewish refugee from Hitler's Europe, meets and begins an affair with Archie Rawlins, a twenty-two-year-old army intelligence officer. Their relationship, mutually suspicious and tortured in the beginning, becomes in the end an affair of desperate passion. Esta tells Rawlins that she has been an eyewitness to murder and atrocity.

Rawlins passes on the information to his superiors only to discover that they are determined to cover up information concerning the plight of the Jews in Europe. He is also told that Esta may belong to a group of Zionist terrorists responsible for the assassination of a senior British diplomat. Who and what should Rawlins believe? The decision that he makes brings fateful consequences to himself and Esta, whose own secrets turn out to be darker than anything Rawlins could have imagined.