Matt Fowler is the protagonist of the story. He is fifty-fiveyears old and has lived in his middle/working-class seaside Massachusetts town for all of his life. He runs and owns a department store, and has three grown children—although Frank, his youngest son, has been murdered before the outset of the story. Matt is acutely observant and sensitive, although such qualities would not be apparent to the naked eye. A man who, by all accounts, would be seen as utterly ordinary, quiet, and harmless, he harbors intense emotions and desires that he keeps buried within himself.These emotions include intense protectiveness of his children and a fear for their lives as they grew up, a sense of loving duty towards his wife, an acute sensitivity to his own eroticism and sexual desires, and a murderous impulse for revenge. The last emotion is really the only one that Matt indulges within the story. Even then, he is wracked by doubt and hesitation.

Intriguingly, Dubus subverts the psychological system of Matt’s interiority through his depiction of the murder that Matt commits. On the occasion of his murder of Richard Strout, Matt uses his expertise in burying his emotions and maintaining a placid persona—which would ordinarily be used in order to maintain the appearance of peace and docility and to signal adherence to norms of civility—to plan and execute a cold-blooded murder.