In The Debt, criminal defense attorney Peter Chavez is summoned by the man who saved his life more than thirty years earlier in Vietnam to defend the man's son on charges of murder and rape of a beautiful Russian journalist in the mysterious and corrupt Russian Far East. Despite his pending presidential nomination to the U.S. District Court bench, the debt that Chavez owes to the man makes refusal impossible. The setting is the Island of Sakhalin in the Russian Far East, a territory that Russia and Japan still dispute--a place rich with oil and gas, and where the remnants of communism contest with the new corrupt capitalism of post-Soviet Russia.