The jeep skidded perilously on the icy surface and Sergeant Willis stopped to put on the chains. While he fitted them, Major Mark Hanlon stepped out into the road and looked through his field glasses at the mountains. Then he saw the skier, a tiny black puppet, motionless. A moment later he began to move, gathering speed, in a flurry of snow - a wild, suicidal plunge down the dazzling hillside. Hanlon watched him, breathless, waiting for the fall. But he came onward, faster and faster, until they could see the grey of his uniform and the green flashes of the Alpenjager regiment and the rifle slung between his shoulder blades and the gleam of his polished pistol belt. An Austrian soldier, armed and in battle dress. Yet the war had been over for months now......

Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh, Australian in Paris, top-notch international lawyer, happily-married New World gentleman, is sixty-five. But arriving on his birthday is a sealed letter from Rome, bearing the arms of the ancient house of the Farnese di Mongrifone. Affectionate, imperious, it is a summons from the woman he loved - and lost - forty years previously,in the stormy, opportunistic world of post-war Europe......