"When famed true-crime writer Julian Wells' body is found in a boat drifting on a Montauk pond, the question is not how he died, but why? The death is obviously a suicide. But why would Julian Wells have taken his own life? And was this his only crime? These are the questions that first intrigue and then obsess Philip Anders, Wells' best friend and the chief defender of both his moral and his literary legacies. Anders's first clue is an Argentinean crime, which he believes was the great writer's last book idea as well as the beginning of his life's downward spiral. As Anders gathers the missing parts of Wells's life, the journey grows more and more dangerous and complex."--Dust jacket.