Jonathan Dee's novel follows a narrator who flees westward across America with nearly $170,000 in cash, determined to escape not just his past but identity itself. The man, never named, has committed some unspecified transgression that makes his previous life impossible to continue. He lands in an upstate New York town where he insinuates himself into the community, becoming a handyman and quiet presence whose past no one knows. Dee explores what it means for a white man to try to escape his footprint in an era of surveillance and social media, when traces of ourselves follow everywhere. The narrator's attempts at reinvention bump against the impossibility of truly starting over, as the past seeps through in habits, preferences, and guilt. The novel examines how small towns function, how newcomers are accepted or rejected, and what we owe to places and people we have harmed. Dee writes in spare, precise prose that mirrors his protagonist's attempts at self-erasure. The suspense derives less from external threat than from the narrator's psychological state and the reader's uncertainty about what exactly he is running from. The novel asks whether escape is possible and what remains of a person who has abandoned everything that once defined him.