This story begins with an unexpected phone call: a lawyer tells a writer that his father, with whom he has had no contact since age three and whom he has twice tried to find without success, has died. Keith Maillard thus begins to research his father’s life, resulting in a suspenseful work of historical reconstruction as well as a psychologically acute portrait of the impact of a father’s absence. Walking a tightrope between the known and the unknown, Keith Maillard has pulled off a book that only a novelist of his stature could write.