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.