The Current

A chef. A cliff. A couples therapy retreat where someone is about to die.

June Park is a private chef with a dead restaurant and a living guilt. Six months ago, she called the IRS on her business partner, and the investigation killed everything: the accounts, the staff, the twelve-table Korean-Californian restaurant in Koreatown that was the best food she ever made. Now she is standing at a counter in Big Sur, cooking for six couples at a luxury therapy retreat called Driftwood, and the standing is the only thing she knows how to do.

The therapist is Dr. Lena Choi, a three-time divorcee whose opening line is: "A mechanic who has never had a breakdown does not know engines." The couples are broken in six different ways. The kitchen has a pass-through window that lets June hear everything. The cliff outside is unfenced. And the food June serves tells her things about these people that the therapy never will.

Then Lena is found at the base of the cliff. Forty feet from the edge. Too far for a fall.

Now June is trapped in a building with twelve suspects, a missing laptop, and the slow, patient realization that the person she likes most at this retreat may be the person who killed her only friend. The investigation unfolds the way a braise unfolds: with heat, with time, with the terrible understanding that tenderness and destruction require the same ingredients.

From the author of The Tide comes a literary mystery about marriage, food, murder, and the conversations we kill to avoid having.