Prisoner's Dilemma is, on the surface at least, a book about family. The Hobson family is a closely-knit group consisting of the mother, father, and four children, two boys and two girls. They live in De Kalb, Illinois, where the father, Eddie Hobson, a former high school history teacher, is ill with terminal cancer, much as Powers's own father was a decade earlier. The family and Eddie do not discuss the disease, nor is Eddie ever referred to as being sick, although at times he is referred to as "not well."

At one point, Eddie is sufficiently unwell that Ailene, his wife, cons him into entering the hospital, but Eddie quickly and clandestinely engineers his own escape. He has a need to return to the place where his illness began in 1945: Alamogordo, New Mexico. He was stationed there during his wartime military service. He was there...