Bernard Vipont is a man leading a double life. By day he is a lawyer with his own quietly flourishing practice in Marseille, a devoted father who dotes on his headstrong daughter Marion, in every way a respectable bourgeois.Beneath the surface, his life is driven by darker, more violent passions.

Armed with a list of wartime collaborators who had appropriated works of art from Jewish collectors denounced to the Nazis, a list compiled by his father before he himself was murdered by the Milice, Vipont is waging his own secret campaign of vengeance - stealing back paintings with the helpof his Gitane accomplice, Luis Karoly. But there is another facet to his secret life: obsessed with a wartime sexual encounter that ended in tragedy, he is condemned to repeat it night after night in Madame Ghazakian's brothel-vainly seeking release from his demons.

Now the two strands of his clandestine existence are about to be entwined,as he becomes embroiled in the affairs of a local monastery which harbours its own guilty secret. For Vipont, the past is about to erupt into the present,with devastating results.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14