July 1955. Eighteen-year-old Shelby Blaine and her father, an Air Force intelligence officer, have just been wrenched away from their old life in West Germany to New York's Griffiss Air Force Base, where he has been summoned to lead the interrogation of an escaped Russian pilot. Still in shock from the car accident that killed her mother barely a month earlier, Shelby struggles as much with her grief and the emotional gulf between her and her father as having to start over in a new home. Then a chance meeting with the would-be defector spirals into a deadly entanglement, as the pilot's cover story is picked apart and he attempts to escape his military and intelligence handlers, with Shelby caught in the middle. The more she learns of his secrets, including his detention at Auschwitz during the war, the more of an increasingly willing accessory Shelby becomes, even as she begins to see that she can only trust herself to discover who is lying and what is really happening.