The celebrated translator of Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Prize-winning Snow offers an arresting vision of contemporary Turkey, in a story of first love, betrayal, and one American girl trapped in the fray.

In October 2005, only a few months after her Turkish husband and five-year-old son are detained by U.S. border patrol, Jeannie Wakefield disappears. She leaves behind in Istanbul a 53-page letter revealing a convoluted tale of political intrigue, intelligence operatives and Turkish teenage radicals, of a grisly murder and a dismembered body in a trunk. It is a grim and heartbreaking history of first loves shattered and best friends betrayed. Can Jeannie be saved? Is she as innocent as she seems?