Adult

What made Tom so restless during the last six weeks of his life? Why was he up all night and brooding all day long? What-or who-was at the heart of his dark moods? With the coroner's report in hand, Tom's wife, Selma, decides to enlist the help of Kinsey Millhone to find the truth about what happened to her husband. But the residents of Nota Lake keep their secrets close-and their enemies closer. And the deeper Kinsey's investigation goes, the closer she comes to confronting the most dangerous outcome of all: the truth...

Anne Tyler's fourteenth novel presents Barnaby Gaitlin, the latest of her quirky characters trying to cope with a less-than-perfect life. Barnaby has been in trouble ever since adolescence. He had this habit of breaking into other people's houses, not so much to steal things, but because he liked to read other people's mail and pore over their photo albums. But for eleven years now, he's been working steadily for Rent-a-Back, renting his back to people who can't move thier own porch furniture or bring the Christmas tree down from the attic. Still, when the chips are down, he learns that his family and friends really don't trust him, and his world falls apart.