Alex Glauberman is a forty-year old divorced father of one who fixes foreign cars for a living and is in the midst of chemotherapy. He likes to take things apart and put them back together, and hes emotionally and chemically influenced to follow out his fantasies more than he otherwise might. So it is with growing excitement that Alex becomes involved with a stranger in a post office -- Gerald Meyer, an older, sadder man who asks him to mail a package and then, desperately, wants him to intercept it before the recipient can find out whats inside. And then, very close to Alex, Meyer turns up dead, sending Alex off on a search for package, perpetrators, and to prove his own innocence, an adventure that takes him London and to Berlin in the last years of the Wall. Along the way he is plunged into the wreckage of Gerald Meyers life, a wake that includes a grown daughter, half-German and half-Jewish, as well as an underworld network, unusual banking transactions, blackmail, shadowy neo-Nazis, and a city in which, as Meyers daughter puts it, Under all the showy stuff, Berliners are frightened of so many things. All the while, he must contend with police detectives in two countries, doling out and seeking bits of information while explaining his actions with metaphors such as the Yiddish meaning of his family name. And he must try to reassure his own young daughter -- and his new British sweetheart -- that he is a better, more devoted, and more careful man than the one in whose life and death he has become enmeshed. This is the book that kicked off Clusters Alex Glauberman series, leading Publishers Weekly to declare him a writer to watch, and Tony Hillerman to say that he raises the mystery to the realm of literature.