 On the advice of his psychologist, Dr. Kamen, Edgar relocates southward, renting a beach house on the island of Duma Key, off Florida's coast.Kamen further advises Freemantle to rekindle his onetime sketching hobby as a restorative.Edgar retains local college student Jack Cantori as part-time shopper and personal assistant; soon after, Freemantle meets and befriends the island's other full-time residents, octogenarian heiress Elizabeth Eastlake (sufferer of final-stage dementia, whose family trust owns most of the island), and her live-in attendant, Jerome Wireman, himself a once-gifted attorney whose wife and daughter's tragic deaths led him to (unsuccessfully) attempt suicide via gunshot wound.