When his employer, Hutte, retires and closes the detective agency where he has worked for eight years, Roland embarks on a search for his own identity.

He and several friends (Denise Coudreuse, a French model who shares his life; Freddie Howard Luz, a British citizen originally from Mauritius; Gay Orlov, an American dancer of Russian origin; and André Wildmer, an English former jockey, all of whom are enemy nationals) went to Megève to escape a Paris that had become dangerous for them during the German occupation.

Denise and Pedro attempted to flee to Switzerland, and paid a smuggler who abandoned them in the mountains, separating them and leaving them lost in the snow.

At the end of the novel he is about to follow the last clue that remains to his past: an address in the Via della Botteghe Obscure in Rome, where Jimmy Pedro Stern is recorded as having lived in the 1930s.

At the time of publication, French reviews considered Rue des Boutiques Obscures to be Modiano’s best novel to date[4] and praised the author for his economic style comparable to Kafka or Camus’ The Stranger.