There isn't much crime in Stoneleigh, Massachusetts. It's a college town, a mountain getaway for the quietly rich, where the average burglar alarm is set off by foraging wildlife. So when Edward Inman, the owner of Stoneleigh Sentinel, gets a late night false alarm from the home of Doyle Cutler, one of his wealthiest clients, Edward thinks nothing of it, not until a local student, Mary Steckl, claims that she was sexually assaulted at Cutler's house.
Edward soon finds himself drawn to Mary's story, even though the rest of the town doubts her, including his wife, a rising politician who has made security the platform of her mayoral campaign. While homework from a creative writing class is leaked as evidence of a dark secret between Mary and her father, Edward's investigations lead him to his old girlfriend, Kathryn Williams, whose teenage son may hold the key to the truth about that night.
"A gripping, troubling, and incisive portrait of the way we live now . . . Has the ambitious sweep and narrative power of a nineteenth-century novel."
Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children on Human Capital
"Like Rosellen Brown's Before and After and Scott Spencer's Endless Love, Human Capital grounds [its] plot in meticulously observed social details, its relentless pacing in some shrewd psychological insights. And Mr. Amidon proves himself a nimble storyteller, providing the reader with a solid, literate and consistently compelling tale."
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times on Human Capital
"Amidon's novel is a wonderfully wicked satire on a twenty-first-century gilded age . . . His book is more than just one family's story. It's a portrait of a whole society caught in a dead end that everyone insists will lead somewhere after all."
