Dan Chaon weaves together two sensational crimes separated by decades: a 1983 massacre that left multiple people dead in an apparent Satanic cult murder, and a series of young men found drowned in a present-day college town. The connection is Dustin Tillman, a psychologist whose adopted brother Rusty was convicted of the earlier killings but has just been released after DNA evidence exonerated him. As Dustin grapples with the implications of his brother's innocence, questioning memories he had been certain about, a former patient draws him into investigating the drownings. Chaon constructs a labyrinthine narrative that shifts between perspectives and time periods, challenging readers to determine what is real, what is misremembered, and what is deliberately hidden. The novel explores how unreliable memory is, how families construct narratives that may have little relation to truth, and how the desire to find patterns can lead investigators astray. Chaon creates an atmosphere of mounting dread as the connections between past and present crimes remain tantalizingly unclear. The book belongs to the genre of literary thriller, more interested in psychological exploration than resolution, leaving readers with questions about the nature of truth and the stories we tell ourselves. A formally innovative work that uses mystery conventions to examine the fundamental unreliability of human memory and perception.