Mel is bored with her life, until the elderly woman next door is nearly murdered, and she sets out to find who is responsible by investigating her neighbors, including the handsome, but mysterious, man who has come to dog sit for his comatose aunt.

"Reeling from a breakup with his almost-fiancée, the narrator of Andrew Palmer's first novel returns to his hometown in Iowa to house-sit for a family friend. There, a chance flick of the TV remote and a correspondence with an old grad school classmate plunge him into unlikely twin obsessions: the reality TV show The Bachelor and the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Berryman. As his heart begins to mend, his fixation with each deepens and calcifies,...