The work’s protagonist and principal narrator, Murdoch is an expert investigator, former spy, and trained psychologist. Orphaned in childhood, he finds himself an easy fit for the world of espionage and its moral compromises. Reflecting on his difficulty recovering from his trauma and bonding with his foster parents, Murdoch says, “I realized that taking on another identity, masking so much of who you are and what you feel, was ideal training for the secret world” (21). Murdoch joins an ultra-covert agency known as the Division, in charge of investigating crime and corruption within all American intelligence agencies. This includes investigating murders and sometimes participating in assassinations. He claims profound emotional distance from his foster parents in his youth, yet Murdoch is changed forever by a trip with his father, Bill Murdoch, to a Holocaust Museum, where he is haunted by a photograph of a mother with her children. The heroism the mother shows by comforting her children through inevitable doom is a bond robbed from Murdoch, which enables him to make the moral compromises he must in his line of work, but also contributes to his story arc and growth into someone forging connections. Murdoch refers to the Holocaust Museum frequently, underlining that whatever has set him apart from others, he remains obsessed with the nature of suffering, especially that of parents and children.