This novel is about revelations and revenge on a Volga Cruise from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

Confessions by a struggling American child psychologist and by a retired American ambassador with an exaggerated sense of importance and entitlement, now a university professor of practice with ethics his chosen specialty, are triggered by a tour of Moscows Novodevichy cemetery.

At the beginning of a television episode of The Closer, viewers are told that everyone has something to confess. Some confessions, however, have serious consequences, as Francis Pickle and Neville Ogleby discover at the end of their ten-day cruise aboard the Novikov Priboi.

In the wings of this novel stands a Russian figure, father of the tour guide and friend of the study leader, who considers it an absolute duty to exact revenge for false accusations made years earlier by Ogleby and Pickle about an American whose ashes are interred in the Novodevichy cemetery alongside those of a KGB general.