About The Book

When the body of famed writer Julian Wells is found in a boat drifting on a Montauk pond, Philip Anders, Wells’s best friend and literary executor, must find out why the young and successful Wells appears to have taken his own life. Anders’s first clue is an Argentinean crime, which he believes was the great writer’s last book idea as well as the beginning of his life’s downward spiral. As Anders gathers the missing parts of Wells’s life, the journey grows more and more dangerous and complex. Soon the friend and the man Anders thought he knew becomes shrouded in mystery, and the ever-deepening puzzle threatens to consume him entirely.

Told in Thomas H. Cook’s lyrical prose, spanning four decades and three continents, this richly plotted and brilliantly told story is a voyage into the depth and darkness of a man’s heart.

Praise

“Cook’s characterizations are richly balanced and finely nuanced, with a narrative driven more by psychological insight than pyrotechnics.” —Los Angeles Times

“An homage to the Graham Greene school of spy novels—erudite, layered, set in the modern day but with a distinctly antique overlay, all croquet and Proust and crumbling towers . . . a well-crafted story.” —Charlotte Observer

“A striking example of a suspense writer working at the top of his form.” —Los Angeles Times

“[A]n intelligent and elegant work.” —The Wall Street Journal