The year is 2009, and Jonathan Alkaitis is in a minimum-security prison in South Carolina, serving a 170-year sentence for multiple counts of investment fraud. Alkaitis struggles to get used to the people he meets in prison, and the way time passes while he’s incarcerated. His cellmates are the sort of people who would not last long in a prison’s general population, consisting of other white-collar criminals, crooked police officers, celebrities, and child molesters. The surroundings are bland.

To kill time, he reads novels he’s never read before, exercises, and volunteers for work details. A journalist named Julie Freeman interviews him for a book she’s writing, and asks why he never used his considerable resources to flee the country. He honestly responds that it had never occurred to him.

Nevertheless, while in prison, Alkaitis indulges himself in what he calls “the counterlife.” In this imaginary past life, Alkaitis spent more time getting to know the interesting people he ultimately fleeced of their life’s savings. In the counterlife, he flees the authorities like an action-movie spy, riding down with the window washers on the side of his Manhattan penthouse and removing himself to a country like the United Arab Emirates, where there is no extradition treaty.