Summary: A police detective, nearing retirement and gradually losing his eyesight to retinitis pigmentosa, learns that some flaws in his investigation of a murder twenty years ago led to a wrongful conviction. The wrongfully convicted man, now released from prison while the crime is reinvestigated, tries to make a fresh start, but is frustrated by the suspicions and uncharitableness of others and by his own habits of concealment and suspicion. Although the actual murderer is finally identified and the wrongfully convicted man is cleared, neither of the protagonists can manage to admit or rise above his limitations, and the book ends with a sad acknowledgement of the impossibility of compensating for injustice.