Jacob Sellars, a New York City newspaper reporter, is assigned to cover the memorial services for oil tycoon Joshua Crane, whose corporation has an ambiguous history and suspicious ties to U.S. intelligence agencies. Sellars, who is trying to come to grips with his own troubled past, seizes the chance to write a freelance article about the Crane family, one of New England's most venerated.

In the process, Sellars develops an obsessive romance with Crane's granddaughter, a strident critic of the current administration's foreign policy in the Middle East. His investigations uncover the fact...