Summary

It is early spring. Forty-nine-year-old globe-trotting journalist and novelist Frank Goldberg prepares to leave New York City for the five-hour train ride to his boyhood home in suburban Boston. Even as he heads to Penn Station, he remembers with a shudder growing up under the menacing threat of his violent and often abusive father, Bert. His father, a first-generation Jewish Russian immigrant, once dreamed of being a doctor but became instead a chemical engineer and designed porcelain dentures for more than 40 years. His father died several years earlier. When Frank is in Boston for the long weekend, he will do a radio interview about the nearly seven years of reporting he did while in Guatemala during the late 1990s investigating how a powerful general now running for president was involved in the 1998 assassination of a popular if controversial antigovernment Catholic bishop. In...