As he walked past all of this he had a fixed image of a tropical beach in his mind…he cannot help wonder whether…this place is nothing but the same old ugliness spackled with an unconvincing veneer of beauty.
-- Narrator (Indigo Bay)

Importance: Is the world what it is, Claire’s father ponders as he sips his morning cocktail on his resort balcony, or is the world what I need to see it is, what I believe in my imagination it ought to be? Although it has the feel of a murder mystery or a true-crime docudrama, the novel foregrounds the telling and, in so doing, explores the power and reach of the imagination. Claire, as narrator, extends the grasp of her imagination in creating, deconstructing, and then recreating the circumstances of her sister’s death until that energy, rather than Alison’s death, centers her psychology. Here Claire’s father wonders whether...