The main character of the novel (Brian Mason) is a New York publisher who once served in Thailand during the Vietnam War and whose brother was killed in battle in Vietnam. A plea for help from his brother's Thai widow sends him back to Thailand where he finds that the nostalgic portrait he carried of Thailand Past bears little resemblance to reality. Little by little, he begins to uncover deception - both past and present, to learn the truth about his brother's death and to better understand his own character.

As the publisher is entering middle-age and becoming more dissatisfied with his job and situation, he welcomes the urgent request from his brother's widow to return to Thailand. It fits in perfectly with his own plans for signing up Asian novelists writing on their own countries. As he was also in love with the woman himself before she chose to marry his brother, his emotions while returning to Thailand for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century run high.

On the way Brian stops in Hong Kong to check out the colony's printing facilities, and unexpectedly meets his former American girlfriend from San Francisco State College (with flashbacks to the 1968-69 riots).

In Thailand, his brother's widow tells Brian that she sent him no letter but asks him to help her daughter (by her first marriage to a Thai husband). Brian remembers the girl as an adorable three-year-old, but she is now a 23-year-old college student who suddenly quit school to become a go-go dancer on Bangkok's Patpong Road.

Brian meets the daughter and learns that it was she, not her mother, who wrote to him. Despite his best efforts, he falls in love with her; a situation complicated by the unexpected arrival in Bangkok of his former American girlfriend.

Brian eventually learns that his brother was killed not by communist soldiers but by an American-run drug ring he had refused to join. He also learns of the guilt of those he had befriended and even loved. By the end of the novel, he has come to terms with himself, ready to return to New York.

Scenes in the novel range from Manhattan's Washington Square Park to a typhoon-ravaged Hong Kong to Thailand's notorious nightlife and warlord betrayals inside the Golden Triangle. Although the novel has elements of an exotic thriller, it is, at heart, the story of a man coming to terms with reality and with himself.