Summer's coming to a close, having brought the usual slew of zippy beach reads: police procedurals, thrillers, true-crime tomes, zombies and vampires, blood-and-guts galore. The heat and humidity are still here, however, and if you're looking for something a little less grisly -- but still a page-turner -- to help you through the dog days, you might want to check out "The Last Talk With Lola Faye," the new novel by Thomas H. Cook. Don't worry, there's enough summer fun in here for thriller fans -- the story we're treated to involves murder, adultery and, as our narrator tells us, "old bills too high to pay, but which keep coming in" -- but Cook, the winner of numerous Edgar Awards, is less interested in CSI theatrics than he is in investigating the idea of redemption, that realization that "the last best hope of life is that at some point during living it, all that you did wrong will suddenly teach you to do right."

As the story opens, Lucas Page -- a would-be novelist who now writes history books, has separated from his wife, and who, by his own admission, is a man whose "great effort and grand ambition has produced works of startling mediocrity" -- has arrived in St. Louis to deliver a lecture on his latest book. The talk is sparsely attended, which comes as no surprise to him. What is a surprise, however, is that in the audience is Lola Faye Gilroy, the woman who for years he has blamed for his father's murder. Lola Faye was the Other Woman in a triangle that left three people in Glenville dead: Page's father (by murder), his mother (by suicide) and Lola's slow-witted, put-upon husband, who it was determined first killed Page's father out of jealousy and anger, then turned the gun on himself. Lola Faye is older now, worn out (as is Page) from trying to escape the Glenville of her mind, and she has come now to talk about the past. And, perhaps ominously, to set the record straight.

And talk the two of them do. The story cuts between their conversation in a hotel bar and memories of the past, and gradually -- at the insistence of Lola Faye, who is by turns a purposefully naive and a steely, menacing interrogator -- Page comes to realize that he never understood the full picture. For the reader who can handle the frenetic jumping between present and past (a narrative strategy that is inherently un-suspenseful), and endure a few annoying red herrings, "The Last Talk With Lola Faye" will emerge as an eloquent articulation that "the truths we won't face are the ones that never stop pumping their slow poison into our blood." It's a story about coming to terms, a thriller whose engine is regret, and for Page, as well as for the reader, it was a talk worth having.

Ethan Rutherford's fiction has recently appeared in the Best American Short Stories 2010. He lives in Minneapolis.