1943. As Britain prepares for the deadliest year of its continuing war in the air, a young RAF officer is shot dead in what appears to have been a drunken brawl at an airfield dance. For Frederick Rowlands, blinded veteran of the First World War, the incident has a personal connection. The man accused of the crime, Polish resistance fighter, Jan Wawrzkowicz, is also the man with whom Rowlands’s daughter, Anne, a member of the WAAFs based at RAF Mildenhall, is in love. While the Lancaster bomber raids on Germany take their toll — both on the civilian population and on the young pilots and crew of the huge aeroplanes — Rowlands must fight to clear Wawrzkowicz’s name, in the process uncovering a web of treachery and lies that threatens to undermine the war effort and with it any hope of peace.