As Joanne Kilbourn-Shreve, her husband, Zack, and their soon-to-be seventeen-year-old daughter, Taylor, rush through the rain from their cottage to their car, the Thanksgiving weekend they just spent at the lake with Zack's law partners is already slipping away, burnished into memory as pleasantly as the hundreds of other weekends the Falconer-Shreve families have shared at Lawyers' Bay. Thoughts of the weekend past will now focus on the future and be prefaced by the words "next time." Within weeks, a triple homicide will rip apart the lives of those related to the lawyers who, at the end of their first year in law school, only half-jokingly styled themselves "The Winners' Circle." Dazed by grief, Joanne will seek answers to an impossible question: "Why did they die?" The facts behind the suicide of Christopher Altieri, known by his law partners as "the conscience of The Winners' Circle," appear to provide insights, but for Joanne those insights raise new, unsettling questions. Knitting this powerful narrative together is Joanne's unshakeable belief that the only thing worse than knowing is not knowing.