Imagine this: You have a nice life. You love your beautiful, successful wife. You’re an easygoing guy working out of your comfortable Connecticut home. The world is an interesting, pleasant place. Then in seconds, it’s all gone. You’re still alive, but the world thinks you’re dead. And now you have to decide: make it official, or go after the evil that took it all away from you.

Arthur Cathcart, market researcher and occasional finder of missing persons, decides to live on and fight by doing what he knows best—figuring things out without revealing his status as a living, breathing human being. Much easier said than done in the post-9/11 world, where everything about yourself and all the tools you need to live a modern life are an open book. How do you become a different person? How do you finance an elaborate scheme without revealing yourself? How, as a dead man, do you force a reckoning with the worst people on earth?

Mystery writer Chris Knopf, who has examined complex what-ifs in eight other novels, tackles these intriguing questions in a tale of mindless venality, phantom identity, impossible obstacles, and the triumph of intellect and imagination over brute force.