Departures

At the edge of sixty, a disgraced Upper East Side lawyer named Parker Whitestone shaves his head, abandons his phone and wallet in a Penn Station trash can, and vanishes—leaving behind a dying almost-stepmother, an estranged daughter, and a marriage that quietly imploded years before. In his place walks Ed McNulty, a man built from a forged Michigan birth certificate and a stolen name.

Departures follows Parker’s engineered disappearance from Manhattan to Sault Ste Marie, a small city on the Canadian border where reinvention proves harder than a new name and a thrift-store wardrobe. As Ed, he’s drawn into the troubles of a family sheltering a wrongly imprisoned man, a small-time loan shark’s poker debts, and a police lieutenant with something to hide—unfinished business that calls on the sharp legal instincts Parker was supposed to have left in New York.

Interwoven with the present-day chase is Parker’s own history: a childhood marked by a war-scarred, volatile father, a mother trained into silence, and the private calculus of a boy learning to disappear long before he ever boarded a train south. Wry, unsentimental, and often very funny even at its darkest, Departures asks what’s actually salvageable when a man burns down his own identity to start over—and whether escape and reinvention are ever really the same thing.Add product gallery images

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