A retired, widowed Seattle surgeon with terminal cancer decides to commit suicide by faking a hunting accident in eastern Washington. His daughter and grandson don't know about the diagnosis, and he wants to spare them and himself the painful decline. He has the trip neatly mapped out, but it goes wildly astray, starting with a car accident which he inconveniently survives. I guess I'd have to call it a picaresque novel, if the hero of such a tale can be in his seventies, in pain, and look like a hobo. Don Quixote, anyone? Along with his current adventures, he thinks back over his childhood in an orchard in eastern Washington, where he fell in love with his future wife, and serving in WWII in Italy. He writes as beautifully about eastern Washington in this book as he did about the San Juan islands in Snow Falling on Cedars.