Spring 1991: Nicholas Newman, 38, a fashionable and affluent English architect, takes a short holiday in a discreet Swiss hotel. He is still deep in confused mourning for his lover Madeleine, murdered with appalling brutality.

After dinner, an elegant Hungarian couple tell him of the villa they are restoring in Italy. They show him the photographs, in one of which. stands a small amethyst carving of the Eiffel Tower. Concealing his shock, Newman recognizes it as the only object missing when the police inventoried Madeleine's apartment.

Immediately, Newman's life is attacked ferociously and inexplicably.

Enter Lukas Waterman, the elderly man who was Madeleine's hidden mentor.

He makes Newman read a document chronicling a top-secret Nazi project, the Family Institute, in which Jewish family relationships were destroyed from the inside.

The effect that an evil such as the Holocaust can bring to bear upon all who have merely heard of it, much less experienced it, soon becomes painfully clear, as Newman is forced to relive the horrors of that ghastly experiment - while becoming inextricably caught up in the increasingly violent events surrounding the few survivors.