Three years after vanishing from his life in American suburbia without a word to his wife and children, Richard Keiffer has finally managed to shore up his life on a wine estate in the southwest of France. Decades earlier in this illusive haven, took place a tragedy that threw a bright-eyed young woman onto a seedy path and turned her worldly gentleman nemesis into a ghostly patient in a farmhouse attic. A resurgence of that tragedy will entrap Richard in a vortex of events that will force him to rescue the very past he had sought to leave behind and confront the truth behind the derailing of his life a generation earlier. "A Fierce Fall" follows the hero of "A Feeble Drift" and "An Upward Draft" through the third and final stage of his transformative journey, but is written as a stand-alone novel.