Downie's previous books, both fiction and nonfiction, have mostly been centered in Paris and Rome, but here he turns to Carverville, a fictional town along the northern California coast. Following the death of his wife, James returns to Carverville, where he grew up and where he experienced his first love with a girl named Maggie. Forty years have passed since Maggie ran off with a college professor, and James, now a broken man covered in facial hair, comes home after a successful career as a lawyer and judge. He wants to roam along the beach and the trails to try to rekindle the magic of his younger years and perhaps find the will to live again.
Beverly, a talkative older woman who thinks like Sherlock Holmes, runs Eden Seaside Resort and Cottages, and puts James to work fixing up the landscape, thus the novel's title. Taz, a strange-looking teenager with a flair for the latest technology, also helps her, and he and James soon form a bond. Beverly hints that Carverville is an evil place, despite its total lack of crime. This lack of crime, as well as its lack of racial minorities and anyone else considered undesirable by the town leaders, may have something to do with the helicopter that patrols the beach and a feral hog trap containing human bones that James finds.
Where the novel fails the smell test is that virtually everyone in Carverville that James meets is someone he knew in high school. These include Harvey, the school bully who has become the sheriff, and Clem, who is both the mayor and the editor of the town's newspaper. Even in a small town, this dominance by one high school class seems extremely unlikely. And then Taz's grandmother turns out to be, as readers will have already guessed, Maggie herself.
So the novel often fails to reflect reality — Downie even portrays the FBI as a sinister right-wing agency instead of the sinister left-wing agency it has become — yet much of the prose is quite stunning and the ending quite exciting.
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