ASHES TO ASHES

In the chaos of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, one man seizes an opportunity at a new life in Sawyer’s novel.

Jack Albertson seemingly leads a fairly enviable life as a successful financier, but after running late to a meeting in the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he impulsively grabs an unexpected opportunity—in the form of identification from someone buried in the rubble. In the ensuing chaos and confusion after the attacks, Albertson begins the process of crafting a new identity while his friends and family mourn his old persona’s apparent death. From there, Sawyer takes readers on a 16-year journey as Albertson, now going by “Hal Jacobs,” becomes an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. Then, in 2017, Albertson’s daughter from a previous relationship, Hayley, who’s now an adult-film actress in Los Angeles, spies “Hal” in a supermarket. She realizes that she’s found her biological father, whom she’d seen only sparingly in her youth. And when it turns out that the real Hal Jacobs did not, in fact, die in that rubble on 9/11, a lengthy game of cat and mouse ensues as Albertson tries to stay one step ahead of the life he’s left behind. The novel’s secondary characters are somewhat underdeveloped, as they’re mostly defined by their actions and responses to Albertson, who looms large over the novel. However, Sawyer provides impressively painstaking details about identity theft, from the mechanics of forgery to the bizarre legal status of being declared dead; readers watch the real Hal struggle to explain to the federal government that he’s not a screenwriter in California but a victim of a crime. Befitting a novel about a man who’s a virtual chameleon, Sawyer peppers the closing chapters with unexpected twists, leaving readers admiring Albertson’s tenacity and the thoroughness of his deceit but also sympathizing with the family he left in the dust.

A compelling tale of a man living a second life as his past threatens to catch up to him.