N is employed at a prestigious California university, where he has distinguished himself as an aloof and somewhat eccentric presence. His meticulous, ordered life is violently disrupted by the death of his estranged father-- unanticipated and, as it increasingly seems to N, surrounded by murky circumstances. After a chance meeting with a young doctor, N begins to have vivid, almost hallucinatory daydreams about the year he spent in Ottawa, and a shameful episode from his past. As a shadowy group of fringe academics becomes preoccupied with a grim chapter in California's history, N's relations with his colleagues grow more and more hostile, and his ability to distinguish between delusion and reality begins to erode. Is he the author of his own investigation? Or is he the unwitting puppet of a larger conspiracy?