Howard Ingham, an American writer, is in Tunisia working on a screenplay, but when the film's director fails to arrive, he feels stranded. The erratic mail eventually brings news of his suicide. For reasons obscure even to himself, Ingham decides to stay on and work on a novel, but a series of peculiar events - a hushed-up murder and a vanished corpse - lures him inexorably into the deep, ambivalent shadows of the Arab town; into deceit and away from conventional morality. Ultimately, what is in question is not justice or truth, but the state of his oddly quiel conscience.