Faye Heron is a Hollywood screenwriter, married to her producing partner, and she owes her whole career to a film professor at the small upstate New York college she attended. He dies, she goes back for the funeral, and there’s Henry Spalding, the professor’s nephew and her college boyfriend, the relationship she got out of because it was swallowing her whole. Then it turns out the death might not have been natural, and Henry has enough on Faye to make her come with him to the family cabin for a week. What happens there, she is never entirely trying to escape and that’s the uncomfortable engine of the book. Knoll writes it like a nineties erotic thriller (Kathleen Turner! William Hurt!) and then delivers an ending that remodels the whole thing.