Nicholas Hansard is a brilliant historian at a small New England college. He specializes in the life and work of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. But Hansard has a second, secret career with The White Group, a "consulting agency" with shadowy government connections. There, he is a genius at teasing secrets out of documents old and new. To call him merely a code-breaker would be an understatement. When Hansard's work exposes one of his closest friends as a Russian agent, and the friend then dies mysteriously, the connections seem all too clear. Shaken, Hansard turns away from his secret work to lose himself in an ancient Marlowe manuscript. Surely, a lost four-hundred-year-old play has nothing to do with a modern-day murder. He is, it turns out, very wrong.