In 2027, Alex Lohmann, a jazz hisorian, lecturer and occasional pianist is recruited to take part in a wide-ranging and strictly controlled government programme to directly research a fifteen month period commencing shortly after America is drawn into World War 2, this venture made possible by the discovery of a time-warp hole in a Pennsylvania town. While based in New York in 1942 he hears and records Buddy Henry, an ill-fated young trumpeter whose playing implies that if he had lived he would have been an infuential figure in the emerging jazz revolution, an important period in the music's development that had remained virtually undocumented at the time as the result of concurrent record ban imposed by the Musicians' Federation. Later, forced by a brush with the law to relinquish his New York posting, Lohmann is reassigned to Kansas City, Missouri, once a significant hive of jazz activity but now a relative musical backwater. During his reluctant time there he experiences an intertwined series of personal and musical encounters that lead to him overstepping a second behavioural boundaries set by the programme's controllers, one of them involving a second meeting with Henry during which his own musical foreknowledge influences the music's future, convincing him that the controllers' reading of the situation is wrong and that he has a role to play in what is happening. His attempts to verify this and to simultaneously ease a deep personal traumainvolve deception and tragedy, culminating in his desparate efforts to returne to a past that he now believes is an alternative one to that of his own catastrophically deteriorating world and leading to the dinal denouement, revealed only to the reader.