Under the sway of a charismatic stranger, five friends at an isolated lakeside cottage find their idyll unravelling, leaving two of them — Lydia Eadon and Dorian Grant — trapped in an explosion of violence that shatters their young lives and propels them past the borders of conventional morality. Forty years later when a body is unearthed from the scene of their revels, Lydia — a book editor in San Francisco — and Dorian — a vagabond actor — are plunged into a terrible reckoning with the past. Like Donna Tartt's The Secret History, this is a chronicle of duplicity and collusion, of innocence corrupted, and of the terrible power of guilt.