You really can’t blame Claire Mehegan for walking naked but for her shabby pink slippers into the frigid Atlantic Ocean that January morning. The needle on her life gauge had flicked from pathetic to pitiful. Until now, Claire had been able to cope with a stagnant marriage, her mundane job as a postal carrier and her two kids moving on to college and lives of their own. Even when her son, Ryan, had been accused of being an accomplice to the murder of a teenage beauty the year before, Claire had rallied and supported Ryan through the crisis, without a scintilla of assistance from her husband. But when Jim had announced the evening before that he was leaving Claire for her good friend and fellow book club member, Claire had simply had enough.

    Nipple-deep in the icy ocean, Claire’s instinct for survival kicks in and she retreats to her home to regroup. Before she can call a divorce lawyer, a Hatherly policeman arrives to tell her that her husband has been found dead of suspicious circumstances. Suspicious, indeed. Jim died from anaphylactic shock when the bottle of Johnny Walker Black he had taken with him as a memento from the house is found to have been laced with an antibiotic to which he is severely allergic.

    Naturally, the police in this tiny coastal town south of Boston think Claire has killed her errant husband, especially when they find Claire’s feverish letters to a fantasy lover, which Claire had written as part of an exercise from a self-help book she had read with her book group. The cops are convinced the lover exists and may have been Claire’s accomplice. If Claire didn’t kill Jim, the cops think her son did. When Claire finds out Ryan was in Hatherly the night Jim was murdered, she is dismayed, but more so when she learns he came to see his secret love, the sister of a young girl who had been murdered last year.