Dr. Randall Archer is a misfit... ...in the brutal blue-collar home where he grew up. ...as a sixteen-year-old escaping to college, then medical school, on a full scholarship to Harvard. ...in the highest echelons of Boston society, where the woman he marries and the blueblood research partner with whom he shares his laboratory belong. Even Archer's brilliance as a pathologist catapults him into direct and dangerous conflict with the medical establishment he fought so hard to join. As the Great Depression presses down around him, Archer teeters at the edge of a precipice. He must choose between his hard-won career and the sacred oaths he took as a doctor and scientist-before all his choices are lost forever.