Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house her brother has muscular dystrophy her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. How far will Alkaitis go to deny responsibility for his actions? And how quickly will his wealth corrupt the ambitions of those in proximity to it? In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences and how disastrous it can be when such fragile bonds shatter under pressure. At its heart, this is a ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical.

It's in these dreamy sections that Mandel's ideas about guilt and responsibility, wealth and comfort, the real and the imagined, begin to cohere. In his jail cell, he is confronted by the ghosts of his victims and escapes into 'the counterlife,' a soothing alternate reality in which he avoided punishment. For Alkaitis, reality itself is too much to bear. For Vincent, the promise of transformation comes when she's offered a stint with Alkaitis in 'the kingdom of money.' Here, the rules of reality are different and time expands, allowing her to pursue video art others find pointless. Slowly, Mandel reveals how her characters struggle to align their stations in life with their visions for what they could be. There's Paul, Vincent's half brother, a composer and addict in recovery Olivia, an octogenarian painter who invested her retirement savings in Alkaitis' funds Leon, a former consultant for a shipping company and a chorus of office workers who enabled Alkaitis and are terrified of facing the consequences. How did Vincent Smith fall overboard from a container ship near the coast of Mauritania, fathoms away from her former life as Jonathan Alkaitis' pretend trophy wife? In this long-anticipated follow-up to Station Eleven (2014), Mandel uses Vincent's disappearance to pick through the wreckage of Alkaitis' fraudulent investment scheme, which ripples through hundreds of lives.

A financier's Ponzi scheme unravels to disastrous effect, revealing the unexpected connections among a cast of disparate characters.

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