It’s five years since Penny’s murder. Paul Morris still lives in the last outermost house on the beach in Easton, Cape Cod. He keeps trying to drink away the trauma of finding his mercurial ex-girlfriend with her throat slit. Paul keeps telling himself he has the ocean, red wine and the last beach house allowed on the National Seashore. What could be better? His friend Herbert keeps trying to get him to AA meetings with little success. The daughter he discovered after Penny’s death moved to London. His friends who helped him find the killer have moved on with their lives. Arthur Dean Kaminski, the damaged Vietnam vet who saved his life, has disappeared. Paul doesn’t even bother with a glass anymore.

‘Nothing,’ he decides, ‘can change my life,’ until, on a November day, he finds a teenager on the beach with a spear from a speargun in his back. Evidence begins to point to Paul Morris, the drunken beach bum.

How could this happen again?