Leon Ganz is a literary thief: his career as a writer rests on the stories he pillaged from his father’s life. But when a chance encounter at the old man’s funeral reunites him with a childhood friend, John Neville, Leon’s work starts to look more like grave-robbing. John has unearthed the details on a secret trip Leon’s father took with two buddies decades ago, ending in a brothel in Mexico City, with dire consequences for them and their families. Now, as John urges Leon to force this material into the shape of a narrative, Leon’s world devolves into a carnival of mirror images, sex tourism, bigamy, and the terrors of the algorithmic age.

Swift, stylish, at once brash and fraught, Snare of Marigold stages an ethical duel over who gets to write the past. But it offers no easy answers, and it skewers the certainties of those who pretend they have them. Moving with the metafictional swagger of Rob Doyle and Philip Roth, it strides into a thicket of fraud and appropriation, of competing facts and abundant falsehoods, and rides roughshod over the lines of propriety that define what can and can’t be said.