Booktails: The Imagined Life 

“I suppose I could have always asked my father what his cryptic scribblings meant, but somehow it seemed more fun, or at least more exciting, to try to decipher them myself, to think of them as a kind of puzzle or game I had to unravel.”

There’s something about the lazy hush of summer that sends me drifting toward the mystery aisle of every bookstore I pass. My mind starts to crave riddles. Not just blood-stained puzzles, but quiet ones. Stories with secrets that linger just out of reach.

This season, instead of reaching for the usual suspects, your Christies and Flynns, I found myself drawn to a quieter, more elusive mystery: The Imagined Life by Andrew Porter.

At first glance, it’s not a mystery in the traditional sense. There’s no murder weapon, no ticking clock. But make no mistake, Porter’s novel is as tense and propulsive as the bloodiest thrillers. Only here, the stakes are emotional, existential. The investigation is inward.

At the center is Steven Mills, a young father quietly unraveling. His wife and son are suddenly gone, having left without a note or a plan. As he tries to make sense of their silence, another, older silence begins to press on him: the disappearance of his own father, a charismatic and brilliant professor who vanished in 1984, when Steven was just twelve. No explanation. No goodbye.

That old mystery becomes the one Steven can no longer ignore. He sets out on a road trip up the California coast, from San Diego to the Bay Area, visiting the people who once orbited his father’s world: former friends, family, colleagues. Each stop offers another half-remembered glimpse into the summer leading up to his father’s disappearance.

Porter masterfully weaves these present-day interviews with vivid recollections from Steven’s childhood, scenes thick with tension, wonder, and the kind of unanswered questions that lodge deep in a young person’s psyche. As Steven combs through dusty bookshelves, cryptic notes, and half-truths, the novel becomes not just a story of loss, but a meditation on legacy, identity, and the strange fictions we build around the people we love.

In The Imagined Life, the mystery isn’t about solving a crime, it’s about confronting the stories we tell ourselves. It’s about chasing ghosts, deciphering scribbled margins, and accepting that some endings don’t come with neat resolutions.

Reading this book felt like being let in on a secret. It was a thrill to investigate this troubled professor’s unraveling alongside his son, and for Bay Area locals, spotting familiar places threaded through the narrative offers its own quiet thrill.

If you loved Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar,one of last year’s Booktails picks,you’ll find The Imagined Life a similar experience. It’s a little shorter, a little less surreal, but just as emotionally resonant.

For the full experience, pair it with a chilled Limoncello Spritz and your favorite Fleetwood Mac record. Grab your copy at Bookshop Benicia, and swing by SIPs on the way home for the ingredients to make your drink of choice. Some mysteries are best unraveled slowly, glass in hand, music humming in the background.