Like an episode of CSI: The Midwest scripted by Russell Banks, The Reconstructionist is a gripping novel of love, betrayal, and psychological suspense.

One instant can change an entire lifetime. As a boy, Ellis Barstow heard the sound of the collision that killed Christopher, his older half-brother—an accident that would haunt him for years. A decade later, searching for purpose after college, Ellis takes a job as a forensic reconstructionist, investigating and recreating the details of fatal car accidents—under the tutelage of the irascible John Boggs, who married Christopher’s girlfriend. He takes naturally to the work, fascinated by the task of trying to find reason, and justice, within the seemingly random chaos of smashed glass, cracked fenders, and broken lives. But Ellis is harboring secrets of his own—his haunted memory of the car crash that killed his brother, but also his feelings for Boggs’s wife, Heather, which soon ripen into a full-blown affair. And when Boggs inexplicably disappears, Ellis sets out to find him . . . and to try to make sense of the crash site his own life has become.

Raising a host of universal questions—Can science ever explain matters of the heart? Can we ever escape the gravitational pull of the past?—Nick Arvin’s novel is at once deeply moving and compulsively readable.