Providential, terrifying, perfectly pitched, this extraordinary novel gives us the inelegant truths of how it can feel to be a middle-aged male writer, husband and father adrift in a world indifferent to everything he stands for. Telling his own story is Keith Stonesifer, a former college English teacher who is determinded after years of professional frustration to carve a new career as a mystery writer. To one side of him is his wife Jill, a failed actress longing to become a therapist. To the other is his eleven-year-old daughter Fran. When Stonsifer picks up a young woman at the tennis courts in Golden Gate Park, he is slowly but inescapably caught in a carnival of anger and rejection, a nightmare descent into brutally casual sex and murder that he finds both abhorrant and alarmingly nurturing. But while Stonesifer experiences a forbidden catharsis on one level, he is once more thwarted in his quest for recognition when his crimes are claimed by a serial killer and his efforts to reclaim them are mocked by the police, who believe he is only faking he has homocidal tendencies because he craves attention. San Franciso singles bars and book signings, Bay Area nude beaches, tailgate parties after the 49ers football games- and even the New York literary scene- all draw Keith Stonesifer as he searches for new meaning in his life and grapples with the limited consolations of present-day love and its illusions. In his most wide-ranging novel to date, David Nemec artfully combines in Stonesifer a dangerously seductive mix; the tortured initmacy of Cornell Woolrich and the spellbinding amorality of Patricia Highsmith.