This mercurial story of love and adultery in a small Wisconsin town spans the course of three decades and serves as undeniable proof positive that people don't always learn from their mistakes or the mistakes of others.

Two stories, inextricably linked, are related to the reader in alternating chapters. Each of the plotlines is character driven and telegraphs a sense of foreboding. Agilely pivoting between one fateful night in 1963 and a single hot July day some thirty years later, Schwartz deftly intertwines the two stories to give us an evocative portrait of sympathetic individuals caught up in unsympathetic situations.