Its tail ablaze, a small business jet plunges from thirty thousand feet into Lake Superior's cold, deep waters. The pilot and his wife perished in the crash. The accident report concluded that structural failure was the cause, and the case was closed.
The couple's only child, twenty-three-year-old Michael Hennessy, devastated by the tragedy, spirals into an alcohol and drug-fueled abyss of depression and self-pity, until a devoted young actress rescues him from his malaise. But as in every previous relationship, Michael lets an insignificant event shatter their connection and drive her away.
At thirty-four, sober, back in control, and sworn off serious relationships, Michael stands on his birthday atop an icy shelf staring out at a frozen Lake Michigan on a gloomy, bitterly cold morning. Lost in melancholy, he is startled by a stranger, who grabs his coat and keeps him from slipping from the edifice and falling to the hard-packed ice below. His rescuer turns out to be a famous writer who befriends him and invites him to her home in Traverse City, Michigan. There, he will meet her three best friends, fall hard into a complicated love affair, and encounter an old Navy aviator friend of his father's, who does not believe his parents' deaths were an accident.
When he hires a private investigator to delve into his father's friend's suspicions, he will open Pandora's box, leading to Egypt and Afghanistan, and exposing a parent's secret life and a dark and dangerous web of deceit, hatred, and revenge that will drag him, and those he cherishes, into its labyrinth of doom.
This is a tale about the intensity of relationships, the stain of dimming time, the heavy onus of hate, and the empty belly of revenge.