I just finished this last night.

It's excellent, a story about how your life can change directions suddenly, unpredictably, and unavoidably.

A middle-aged lawyer, Bill Wyeth, doing quite nicely both professionally and personally, causes, unintentionally, the death of a child.

The child, a friend of his son Timothy, unfortunately turns out to be the much-loved and only offspring of one of New York City's fiercest businessmen.

Though the death was an accident, the result of an improbable chain of unlikely events, the bereaved father and mother are unforgiving.

And that's an understatement.

They systematically set out to destroy Wyeth in every way.

They succeed.

He finds himself homeless, without a family, unemployed, embarked on self-destruction as a way of doing penance himself.

Then he agrees to do a small legal favor for a woman he's become smitten with, and the abyss in which he's living turns out to have been only a rest stop on the way to a far more frightening hell.

This story is told by Wyeth in a matter-of-fact, unemotional tone which only makes the series of bizarre, funny, and surprising events that much more striking and compelling.

Highly recommended.

FunFact: Colin Harrison, the author, is married to the author Kathryn Harrison.