Just the stuff of ordinary life except for one thing: Aliens have landed on the moon. They are watching Earth and earthlings. What is their plan? With the arrival of the aliens, ordinary life is upended in ways that are both hilarious and revealing. While some people fear the aliens’ three-part mandate to save the planet (which might have been written by a Grade 9 student in the US), others think the arrival of the aliens is a golden opportunity for a deep discount weekend at Costco that could possibly rival Amazon’s Black Friday.

First, a myopic private investigator dies while in custody. The autopsy concludes that he died of natural causes; then an assault rifle is found in the trunk of the dead man’s rental car, and the mystery woman he was investigating disappears. Meanwhile, Thumps contends with a couple of horse-thieving octogenarians and a large, slobbery dog acquired in the line of duty.

As the rest of Chinook comes together to cheer on golf novice Wutty Youngbeaver, who is competing in the US Open qualifying tournament up at Shadow Ranch, Claire and Ivory decamp to Alberta, leaving Thumps to contemplate the simplicity of a life lived alone. If he can’t manage something as simple as a dog or a couple of cats, how can he be responsible for another human being? Two human beings?

The plot thickens when ninja assassin Cisco Cruz returns to Chinook, and Thumps finds himself knee-deep in a complicated web of deceit spun by a nefarious collective known as Black Ice. His job? To sort through the lies. It’s like a game of Jenga, where the blocks need to be removed carefully, one by one, or the whole structure will topple.

So Jeremiah does what any intelligent, sensitive person would do. He runs away. Goes into hiding in a small town, at an old residential school on an even smaller Indian reserve with no phone, no Internet, no television. With the windows shut, the door locked, the mailbox removed to discourage any connection with the world, he feels safe at last. Except nobody told the locals that they should leave Jeremiah alone.

And then his past comes calling. Ash Locken, head of the Locken Group, the multinational consortium that Jeremiah has fled, arrives on his doorstep with a simple proposition. She wants our hero to formulate one more forecast, and she’s not about to take no for an answer. Before he left the Locken empire, Jeremiah had put together a list of twelve names, every one a billionaire. The problem is the people on the list are dying at an alarming and unnatural rate. And Ash Locken wants to know why.

A sly and satirical look at the fractures in modern existence, Sufferance is a bold and provocative novel about the social and political consequences of the inequality created by privilege and power–and what we might do about it.