Two boys flee in terror across the grounds of their boarding school, on a night when the rain slices the air like sheets of broken glass and trees bend and groan under gale-force winds. Before midnight one will die, exposing a dark world, centuries old. Emmet Joyce rejects the school's assertion that his son died accidentally. With a Church surrounded by scandal, cover-ups within the Church, and failures to protect children in their care, the priests who run the school no longer command the unquestioning trust of their flock. Emmet trusts only one man to uncover the truth: his cousin, Ed Burke. But Ed is now in Florida, recovering from stress and burn-out in his New York law practice, and a failed attempt to start again in Ireland. Despite his reluctance to return to Ireland, Ed knows that he can't refuse his family at this time of need. So Ed Burke returns again to find that the Ireland of the twenty-first century is still the Ireland of James Joyce where 'Christ and Caesar go hand in glove'. His quest for the truth leads him from Galway and Dublin to Boston and Rome, following a trail enmeshed in one family's desire to occupy the chair of Peter, a desire under threat from that dark world, centuries old. But an avenger stalks the land, one who exacts justice at the end of a rope, one who seeks revenge, not truth. Ed knows that all roads lead to Rome and he also knows that, if he is to uncover what really happened to his cousin's son, he must protect the guilty.