The day after Peter Leverett met his old friend Mason Flagg in Sambuco, Italy, Mason was found dead. The hours leading up to his death were a nightmare for Peter--both in their violence and in their maddening unreality. The blaze of events which followed was, Peter soon realised, ignited by a conflict between two men: Mason Flagg himself and Cass Kinsolving, a tortured, self-destructive painter, a natural enemy and prey to the monstrous evil of Mason Flagg. Three events--murder, rape and suicide--explode in this relentless and passionate novel, almost overwhelming in its conception of the varieties of good and evil.