In the spring of 1969, a young nurse is raped and brutally beaten in a quiet suburb of Boston called Cleveland Circle. Twenty-six years later, a ne'er-do-well Boston accountant, James Courtney Murray, is murdered and a yellowed newspaper clipping describing the old rape is left on his body. The latest DNA-testing techniques confirm his killer's charge: Murray was the Cleveland Circle rapist. Enter Owen Keane, failed seminarian and compulsive solver of mysteries. Keane was a college classmate of Murray's and a fellow suspect in the Cleveland Circle attack. He sets out to clear his friend and find his murderer, driven by his own guilty knowledge of the 1969 crime. As he moves though the Boston of 1995, Keane slips back repeatedly to his lost days in college, both to reexamine the old mystery and to revisit a love affair that had as profound an effect on his life as any murder. He is caught in the middle when the past and present collide in the harrowing climax.