The setting is Seattle’s Lake City neighborhood during the 2001 holiday season. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy and at the peak of Seattle’s first wave of tech-boom gentrification―a wave that never quite made it to his neighborhood―Lane Bueche schemes how to win back his wife (and her trust fund). In his childhood bedroom in his mother’s decrepit old house, the idealistic but self-serving striver Lane licks his wounds and hatches a plot.
He discovers a precarious path forward when he is contracted by a wealthy adoptive couple to seduce and sabotage a troubled birth mother from his neighborhood. Lane soon finds himself in a zero-sum game between the families as he straddles two cultures, classes, and worlds. With the well-being of the toddler at stake, Lane must choose between wanting to do the right thing (if he could only figure out what that is) and reclaiming the life of privilege he so recently had and, he feels, so richly deserves.
Thomas Kohnstamm was born and raised in Seattle. He is the author of the memoir Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? and writes for a variety of video and animation series. Lake City is his first novel. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two children.
Bronson Pinchot began talking at 9 months of age. Today, half a century later, he talks into a microphone in a soundproof booth for a living. In between, he attended Yale University as well as the acting programs at Shakespeare & Co. and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.