In September 1944, near the village of Hortiati in Macedonian Greece the death of one German soldier in an ambush by a guerrilla unit brought on a Wehrmacht retaliation that resulted in the massacre of one hundred and forty-six villagers, sixty-nine of whom were burned to death in the sealed village bakery, and the total destruction of the village. In this fictionalised account of the atrocity, an American journalist seeks to explore whether a now prominent Austrian statesman played any part in what happened.