Greenwich, Connecticut, 1922. Newspaperman Joe Henry finds himself the
primary suspect when his friend and fellow reporter Wynton Gresham is
murdered. Both were veterans of French battles during World War II--the
war that was supposed to end all wars.
Unanswered questions pile up in the wake of a violent night: Gresham
lies dead in his home; a manuscript he had just completed has gone
missing; three Frenchmen have been killed in a car wreck less than a
mile from Gresham's home; and a trunk full of Gresham's clothes sits
neatly packed in his bedroom. When Henry discovers a one-way ticket
reserved in his friend's name aboard a steamship to France, he assumes
Gresham's identity and slips away from the grasp of the town sheriff to
pursue the truth about his friend's death. In Paris, he becomes a hunted
man. To clear his name he must find Gresham's murderer while evading his
own demise and discover the secret revealed in the lost manuscript. In
the process, with the help of other shattered expat veterans living in
Paris, he finds hope in a world irrevocably altered by war. With cameos
from Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, Death of
a Century is at once a playful romp that brings the Paris of the Lost
Generation to life and a compassionate story of the enduring impact of
war on a generation.
