The place is the dying port of Liverpool. Forty-nine-year-old tough, arrogant Alix Rebick believes that she is fated to spend the rest of her life alone. Returning from exile in France to the bedside of her dying mother, Alix receives a final message, forcing her to uncover the family secrets that lie in pre-war Dresden. Joseph Shields, an American architect of Liverpool's restoration, is in a war - with the city's underworld, with his wife back in Chicago, and with his own memories of his time as a combat soldier. What he is not interested in is an affair with the woman who unlocks the city's secrets for him and who is consumed by erotic desire for the American stranger.