Book Jacket Synopsis

Jack Dana, a star history student at Yale with a bright future in academia, feels called to military service after 9/11. His career as a Marine infantry platoon leader is cut short by sniper fire that sends him to Walter Reed Hospital, where he begins writing a novel about his wartime experiences. Helping Jack through recovery is his uncle Harry, Jack’s surrogate father and a partner in a leading New York law firm. Harry’s connections secure Jack a publisher. His work is critically and commercially successful. Life after Afghanistan is falling into place, and a three-month trip to South America seems a fitting reward. But his return home is marred by shocking news: Uncle Harry is dead, hanged in his Sag Harbor summer home, clearly a suicide.

Horrified and incredulous, Jack digs into the facts surrounding his uncle’s death. Aided by Harry’s most trusted associate, Kerry Black, and by his college friend Scott Prentice, who now works for the CIA, Jack discovers that Harry had pierced the secret of his most important client, Abner Brown, a right-wing multibillionaire notorious for backing extremist causes. The stakes and dangers are huge. Harry’s death now seems anything but a suicide.

Delays of law are not for Jack when it comes to avenging his uncle. He takes matters into his own hands. Louis Begley’s taut, intelligent thriller takes readers from the knotty politics of New York law firms to the intimacy of life on the Long Island shore, all with his trademark wit and nuance.

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