Theo Cazalle has come back from the dead: from a "good war" spent fighting with the Free French against the Vichy regime. Unannounced, he arrives at the farm of Bonnemort, eager for a reunion with his wife, his daughter. And discovers, instead, that his wife has been denounced as a collaborator, the lover of an SS officer. The same officer who was found naked, his throat cut, in front of Colonel Cazelle's house.
But what really happened? There are dead Frenchmen - but were they betrayed to the German occupier by their own carelessness or by jealous villagers, cynical comrades? There are two disturbed little girls - but were they terrified into silence by the horrors of the occupation or hurt by people they should have trusted? Was Ariana Cazelle a traitor - or the bravest of heroines? As Theo Cazelle picks up his way through contradictory stories of how their victims were betrayed to the Germans, he comes ever closer to the truth about the dead man at Bonnemort.
