The setting is a small town in Hesse, Germany where a division of the U.S. Army is stationed to discourage the Soviets from crossing the eastern boarder. That said, this is not in any way a war or a foreign story. It is about people, some of them in the US Army. Primarily, there are three married couples, and the husbands, all three of them, are serving in the army and live with their wives in Germany. One other soldier is single. These seven people, and the late-teen sister of one soldier, and a civilian detective attached to the military police, comprise the main characters in the novel.
One of the wives, a young German woman, is married to a career soldier, Beau Curvin. Her name is Marie, and she works two evenings a week as a waitress in a Gasthaus located near a forest. While Marie is beginning the last trimester of pregnancy she learns that Beau is seeing other women, and when she confronts him, Beau beats her senseless. It kills her love and replaces it with hatred. A week or so later she returns to work at the Gasthaus where she serves dinner to a stranger, John Evans, the soldier who is single. John is the aide de camp to an Army Chaplain, the Reverend Charles Hardwick, who counseled the Curvin couple following Beau's abuse. John has been devastated by receipt of a "Dear John" letter from the girl he loves and had planned to marry. When he leaves the Gasthaus there is something crushed in his napkin, something he intended for the garbage.
Months pass before John visits that Gasthaus again, this time with two friends to plan their furlough in Italy. Marie, no longer pregnant, had been longing for his return to the Gasthaus and flirts with John, looking for a true love and believing him a man capable of cherishing a woman. And thus begins a tale that turns on the separate and distinct murders of two of the nine people mentioned above, murders committed by another two of those nine, each on their own with their self-justified crime.
