"It is the turn of the twentieth century. Two couples - businessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife Carole Ridingham, his partner Coleman Snow and Snow's wife Ruth Farr - have gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole's daughter.

Susan lives alone in her parents' house near the coast of Maine, addressing us from a future in which property no longer shapes destiny, a position providing unusual perspective on the way we live now.

Assisted by court transcripts, her mother's letters, a notebook computer containing Ruth Farr's journal, and a menacing young vagrant who camps on her doorstep, Susan ultimately lays open the moral predicament at the heart of the book: we are culpable beings, even though we live in a world of imperfect knowledge."--BOOK JACKET.