A forensics team investigates the murder of a child and is drawn into a chilling international coverup

The body of a young boy is found floating in a city river with pollen in his lungs from a warm river valley far from the country where he died. Who is he? Why was he carrying only a library card and decorative clay bottle? How is it that he came so far, only to meet with a violent fate?

A biological anthropologist and her husband, the forensic team's translator, are tasked by their agency to gather evidence from the far away country and deliver an explanation--preferably one that suits the political regimes of both countries. But as the scientists' clandestine, parallel study of recent mass graves brings them closer to finding a link between the boy and "the disappeared," the full forces of bureaucracy, fatalism, and forgetting are marshalled against them.