In late 2002, with the prospect of war in Iraq looming, an unauthorized and peaceful anti-war protest march in Port Silva degenerates suddenly into a riot, filling the jail and the emergency room. Private investigators Patience and Verity Mackellar are hired to look into the background of one missing protester and find that he has none. But there is a family business, old secrets cover-ups and crimes lurking in the past. As the plot plays out, we learn the importance of good parenting, especially fathering of boys, and the necessity for children to know they are loved. As the W.H. Auden poem September 1, 1939 says, "...What all schoolchildren learn/ Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return." Above all these issues is the nature of a democracy and its citizens? responsibility when their government defies their wishes. All shades of opinion are examined in this suspenseful novel, written by a master of the genre.