Essays inspired by Chabon's interactions with his four children and his own father illuminate the meaning, magic, and mysteries of fatherhood.

Overview: From the masterful New York Times bestselling and two-time Edgar Award-winning author of The Last Child and Down River, comes this tour de force of murder and the dark ripples it sends through a man, his family and community. Jackson Workman Pickens-known to most as Work-mindlessly holds together his life: a failing law practice left to him when his father, Ezra, mysteriously disappeared, a distant wife, and a fragile sister, Jean, damaged...

"Twenty-something Ellie thought she was her father's favorite child; she was sure he would leave her his most prized possession, a baseball with which they played catch, and which sat on his desk, as a kind of inspiration: her poet father's most famous poem was called "The Catch." But when her father's will is read, his children, including from other marriages, each receive a meaningful object, except Ellie, who receives a glow-in-the-dark tie rack...

After his wife leaves him for another man, Hugues Martin's life revolves solely around two things--the celebrated five-star hotel he owns and manages in New York City and his daughter Heloise. At four, Heloise becomes the only woman in her father's life; by seven, she is the undisputed queen of the Hotel Vendome. And as the years pass, despite her mother's abandonment, she basks in her father's love, the devotion of the hotel's staff, and the affection...

Father and son go camping, but who is really taking care of whom?

"Lorraine Dancy has just discovered that everything she believes about her father is a lie--starting with the fact that Thomas supposedly died years ago. Now she's learned that not only is he not dead, he's living in a small town south of the border. In the process of tracking him down, she manages to get framed for theft and pursued by the real thief, the police and a local crime boss. Her father's friend Jack Keller agrees to help her escape, although...

When fourteen-year-old baseball player Hutch feels threatened by the arrival of a new teammate named Darryl, he tries to work through his insecurities about both Darryl and his remote and silent father, who was once a great ballplayer too.

"Mike is a Japanese American chef and Benson is a Black day care teacher. They've been together for a few years, but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. When Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives for a visit, Mike flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together and...

Cotton Malone knows that his father died when his submarine sunk in the north Atlantic in 1971, but not much else. Using his government contacts to discover the details behind his father's demise, he learns that the sub was on a highly classified mission. Now he must find the lost manuscript from the Charlemagne's tomb which points to an Aryan civilization in Antarctica in order tho answer the questions surround his fathers death.

Thirty-two-year-old New Hampshire search-and-rescue worker Delia Hopkins, a soon-to-be-married mother of a five-year-old daughter, begins having strange flashbacks of a forgotten childhood and learns that her father, whom she always believed to be a widower, kidnapped her when she was four--and that her mother is still alive.