Critically acclaimed author John Smolens conjures a world of hidden truths and intrigue in which the familiar is the most mysterious force of all.

For years Samuel Xavier Adams's father has been a shadow figure in his family's lives, vanishing and reappearing, keeping a slender connection from afar while his wife and children are haunted by loneliness, his daughter wasted by addictions, and his son, Sam, hounded by his father's enemies. Sam has spent his life trying to discover what his father, who ?worked for the government,? was doing that was worth the family's ruin. Sam's insistence on answers and his suspicions of his father's involvement in the events of November 1963 drew the wrong kind of attention from powerful quarters, scuttling his journalistic career. But at least, Sam believed, he had put his dealings with his father to rest.

Now the older man has resurfaced, has been seen slipping in and out of his wife's hospital room moments before her death. Her autopsy report is suspicious and her ashes are missing. And Sam is again on his father's trail, in a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek played out in the dark underworld of Boston's hushed and foggy roads and waterways. There are other players in the game?many of them figures from the past whose allegiances and motives are tangled and obscure. All are racing toward a deadly reckoning, and for Sam it may be the last chance to solve the puzzle of his life by seeing his father clearly for the first time, before he inevitably vanishes again.

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