They came for me in November nineteen fifty-one and took me to Mokotow prison.

Cambridge, the present day. And out of the past, a cry for help: Father Anselm, the brilliant Benedictine, receives a visit from an old friend with a dangerous story to tell - the story of a woman betrayed by time, fate, and someone close to her . . . someone still unknown.

As a young woman, Roza Mojeska was part of an underground resistance group in Communist Poland. But after her arrest, an agent of the secret police makes her a devil's bargain - and in the dark of a government prison, a terrible choice is made.

Now, fifty years later, Anselm is called upon to investigate both Roza's story and a mystery dating back to the early 1980s, in the icy grip of the Cold War. And as he peels back years of history, decades of secrets, a half-century of lies, he exposes a truth that victim and torturer would keep hidden...