It is just after WW II and the Schirmer estate has a long history, a battery of lawyers, and millions to disperse. It also has a problem: no heir. It takes a young American attorney to locate one. He succeeds by going back to records of the Napoleonic wars and finds there clues that lead him to Europe. His improbable quarry: a German sergeant in the occupation forces during the war, living as a bandit in the hills of Greece. "A wonderfully ingenious tangle of slow dissolving mystification which has the persuasive nag of truth." (New York Herald Tribune)