Piper, the adopted teenage daughter of Kathryn and Tom Scanlon, refuses to believe that her mother's gruesome death was a freak accident—especially once another sordid story featuring a shared suspect comes to light.

Small-town man Cyrus Stapleton thinks he's done everything right—married early, fathered two precocious kids, and partnered in his Seattle law firm—but his wife, Jude, wants to break out. Cyrus is comfortable in the middle of the pack but she yearns for something more. Envisioning Cyrus as all the czars and dictators of the nineteenth century rolled into a three-piece suit and herself as the liberated visionary, Jude sheds her ring, then her married name, and finally her bewildered husband. Gripped by the helplessness and distortion of vision that accompany the meltdown of his marriage, Cyrus is bewildered. How did it ever come to this? Is it the fault of Jude's Sunday-night women's group and its fiery leader, Lill Epstein, the ex-army feminist with silicone breasts? Does Jude have a new lover? How does a reasonable man behave in the face of his wife's decision and her demands for custody, alimony, and child support? How can he salvage his relationship with...