Seize essais inédits pour décrypter l’art littéraire d’Alice Munro, prix Nobel 2013. Une plongée dans l’univers de la maîtresse canadienne de la nouvelle, de ses débuts dans les années 1950 à ses derniers chefs-d’œuvre.

Retired Detective Kevin Beldon has left Ottawa and gone into retreat at a Buddhist monastery in California following his successful treatment for lung cancer. He's trying to make sense of his life, but death is very much on his mind. And not just his own; he's still trying to come to terms with the loss ten years earlier of his wife and son, victims of Dr. Ewan Randome, an evil mastermind whom Beldon had been forced to let escape. Aside from providing the occasional consultation for the California police, Beldon has happily gone into retirement, but when Global Patrol, the international police force, comes looking for his help on the Malachai case, a serial killer investigation that has them stymied, his interest is piqued. Beldon quickly deduces that the killings are related to his last unsolved case before his retirement two years earlier, a triple murder in his nation's capital, and he suspects the involvement of his old nemesis Dr. Randome in this new round of assassinations. As events unfold, Beldon comes to realize how inevitable it was that Malachai's killing spree would end in New York, and how inevitable his own final showdown with Randome has always been.

When Eugene DeLint, the head of Omphalos, the world's dominant philanthropic organization, is found murdered, Detective Kevin Beldon is called in. Beldon, who readers will be familiar with from Lynch's previous novels, Missing Children and Troutstream, has been on medical leave, and he brings along much personal and professional baggage: his wife Cynthia is a recent suicide, his absent son Bill is a disappointment, and his daughter Kelly, who began her legal career at Omphalos, is emotionally distant with him. Kevin is still disturbed from his failure the year before to have solved the so-called Widower serial killings. He still suspects that the escaped Widower was connected to Omphalos, and secretly he views Eugene DeLint's murder as a last chance to solve the Widower case and so absolve his wife of the sin of suicide.

Dr. Lorne Thorpe, a well-known pediatrician, is on a rare outing with his daughter Shawn when she goes missing. Although Shawn eventually returns, seemingly unharmed but refusing to talk about what has happened, it seems that she is not the only child who has gone missing from their Troutstream neighbourhood. Detective Beldon has been put on the case, but Dr. Thorpe's increasingly erratic behaviour is hindering his investigation. And it's imperative to solve the mystery before more children disappear.