Journalist Joe Talbert investigates the murder of the father he never
knew, and must reckon with his own family's past, in this "brilliant
sequel" to the national bestseller The Life We Bury (Publishers
Weekly)
Joe Talbert, Jr. has never once met his namesake. Now out of college, a
cub reporter for the Associated Press in Minneapolis, he stumbles across
a story describing the murder of a man named Joseph Talbert in a small
town in southern Minnesota.
Full of curiosity about whether this man might be his father, Joe is
shocked to find that none of the town's residents have much to say about
the dead man-other than that his death was long overdue. Joe discovers
that the dead man was a loathsome lowlife who cheated his neighbors,
threatened his daughter, and squandered his wife's inheritance after
she, too, passed away -- an inheritance that may now be Joe's.
Mired in uncertainty and plagued by his own devastated relationship with
his mother, who is seeking to get back into her son's life, Joe must put
together the missing pieces of his family history -- before his quest
for discovery threatens to put him in a grave of his own.