Travel writer Thomas Nesbitt, age 50, retreats into his house in Maine to wallow in memories of living in Germany 25 years earlier after the success of his first book. In West Berlin as a worker for Radio Liberty, Thomas meets his soul mate, Petra Dussmann, a translator with an iron curtain around her heart. Petra's mysterious melancholy proves irresistible, and as Thomas is drawn into a passionate affair, he also becomes entangled in spy games played...

Mallory Marlowe, travel writer for the Good life magazine, heads to Colorado to visit a rich and famous high-school classmate, Carly Cassidy Berman. Carly had it all then and still does--until her corpse turns up in a mud bath. Mallory suddenly discovers that Aspen's main attraction is a dazzling array of suspects, one of whom is eager to see this accidental sleuth's travels come to an end.

When Jerry Delfont, a travel writer with writer's block, receives a letter from an American philanthropist, Mrs Merrill Unger, with news of a scandal involving an Indian friend of her son's, he is sufficiently intrigued to pursue the story. Who is the dead boy found on the floor of a cheap hotel room, how and why did he die?