When fact is stranger than fiction, fiction can be truer than alternative facts. At the center of the worst mass shooting in US history is a black hole. Why did a wealthy, white middle-aged man who liked guns and gambling and once worked for the U.S. government cause this public tragedy? Set over three days in 2017, a small group of journalists is tasked with witnessing and making sense of senseless mass violence as the truth-telling structure collapses. They struggle with malleable facts, disinformation, and conspiracy theories; they are lured by and resist the increasingly popular notion of a hallucinatory mirror world, the sense that important truths are hidden.

A dark satire about American violence and media and the lure of conspiracy thinking, this is the first novel in a trilogy exploring the effects of our dystopian times on inner lives.