In the brutal heat of an August "Dog-Day" afternoon, Detectives Tolya Kurchenko and Pete Gonzalvez climb the rickety stairs of a wood frame house to the third floor to find a sight so astounding it stops them cold. Inside a partially demolished wall sits something between a skeleton and a mummy in a double-breasted suit, Fedora still perched on his head. Who is this man? How long has he been here? How did he get here? The search for his identity opens a long-closed cold case which leads Kurchenko and Gonzalvez back to another murder they solved a few years earlier. The connections are just a little too close.

From the immigrant rooming houses of upper Manhattan in the 1950s and 60s to the terrifying realities of Trujillo's iron-fisted Dominican Republic, from the ashes of the Holocaust to the children of its victims, Forgiving Stephen Rothman will grip you from page one. Sometimes, revenge is more important for the soul than forgiveness.