Book #1 from the series: The Blaine Trilogy

Penned by a #1 New York Times bestselling author hailed as a “terrific novelist” (The Washington Post) comes a spellbinding psychological puzzle filled with unexpected legal twists, potentially criminal turns, and one family’s shocking fall from grace: When Adam Blaine returns home to Martha’s Vineyard for his estranged father’s funeral, he discovers that he’s been cut out of the inheritance. He starts a deep dive into the past of his father’s mistress — and unveils shocking family secrets…

The mysterious, violent death of a prominent New England patriarch exposes a nest of dark family secrets in Richard North Patterson’s twentieth compelling novel.

The novel begins with the arrival of Adam Blaine, after ten years away from home, at the funeral of his estranged father, Ben Blaine, a famous and charismatic writer who has served as patriarch of his clan for many years and left behind him a string of secret legal and financial arrangements, not to mention an emotionally distraught widow and a strangely aloof mistress, who is a beautiful television actress who once had a drug problem. When Adam learns that Ben disinherited his family in favor of his mistress, he begins to wonder if his father’s death—caused by an inexplicable fall from a cliff—might have been suicide or murder. He is soon thrust into the search for his father's killer.

Using his training as a CIA operative, Blaine skillfully seeks to find the truth of his father's death, and unearths some shattering revelations about the mistress’s past. But even more disturbing are the family secrets that can’t stay buried any longer—secrets that make Adam question everything he thought he knew about every player in this fateful game. Even himself…secrets that he was never supposed to know.