Three apparently separate family tragedies — a child's disappearance, a domestic killing, and an inexplicable murder — form the puzzle around a private investigator who reconstructs lives through interviews, documents, and visits.

Six distinct narratives, each written in a different voice and set in a different time and place, are arranged so that echoes between them imply moral and causal connections across eras.

An elderly Congregational minister composes an extended letter to his young son late in life, recounting his own family history, the tensions between pacifism and militant abolitionism in his forebears, and the spiritual convictions that shape his sense of duty and affection.

Set in Laos in the 1970s, an elderly physician with little formal forensic experience is appointed state coroner. He confronts suspicious deaths amid political upheaval and scarce institutional support, and must piece together causes and motives while navigating party politics and local customs.

A multigenerational family story tracking a Bengali couple who relocate to the United States and the next generation raised between two cultures.

A member of a long-lived, blood-dependent species awakens with amnesia and physical injuries and must piece together who she is and how she relates to the human partners her kind depends on.

A first-person narrator recalls growing up at an elite boarding school in an alternate late-20th-century England and the friendships and loyalties formed there while an institutional ethical situation quietly shapes their lives.

Set in Nazi-era Germany, the novel follows a young girl who acquires books and navigates life in an adoptive household while war encroaches on daily routines. The narration comes from Death, offering an outside, occasionally amused perspective on civilians, loss, and the act of reading.

A careful-minded man becomes entangled when a neighbor's emergency draws him into a clandestine act; the novel sets a moral and intellectual test between loyalty and law.