This novel could be charged with false advertising. The one-word title screams sex, and the cover art of a dark-haired beauty in a car, her head thrown back in passionate abandonment, redefines steamy. “That’s a hot-looking book you’re reviewing, Mom,” comments my 21-year-old son.

But anyone familiar with Richard B. Wright’s many novels will know that he is more interested in guilt and retribution than in lust and libido, more fascinated with the quotidian than with the rare dramatic shocks that punctuate it. He will use those shocks as a fulcrum, to help define how a life can be changed forever, but he cares more about reaction than action.

In his award-winning Clara Callan, for example, when Clara lies on the ground being raped by a tramp, she thinks “how suddenly a life can become misshapen, divided brutally into before and after a dire event. So it must be with all who endure calamity.”

In that sense, Dan Fielding, the protagonist of this latest novel, is Clara’s blood brother. A 55-year-old editor at a Toronto publishing house and a happily married husband and father of a teenage daughter, he finds himself footloose at the Frankfurt Book Fair along with 32-year-old Denise, a junior editor in his firm. By midweek he has entered her bed (that is literally all we learn about the sex) and by the weekend they have moved on to Devon for a bit more R&R.

But in a lonely carpark on a rainswept Saturday afternoon, they have a “quickie” and then fall asleep. When Denise gets out of the car later to pee, she disappears. Fielding remembers seeing a strange, disturbed-looking man pass them earlier on the beach and he immediately fears the worst, which turns out to be horribly true. The local police find Denise’s body the next morning a mile from the carpark. The psychotic man is arrested and confesses.

The novel deftly plots Fielding’s week from hell, from the Saturday of the murder to the following Friday of Denise’s funeral in the small Lake Huron town of her birth. A man’s quiet little indiscretion quickly becomes the stuff of international headlines, and the press pursue him like hyenas.

The seven days of the novel constitute a series of confrontations for Fielding: first with the Exeter police, then with his wife and daughter, with Denise’s widowed mother, with his colleagues back in Toronto, with the murdered girl’s close friend, and finally with her intense, surly brother. The structure allows Wright to keep echoing back to before the murder: the Saturday Fielding was watching his daughter play field hockey at her private school, the Thursday Denise’s mother was playing euchre at the Legion Hall. Now all is shattered and must be rebuilt from the ground up, including, if possible, Fielding’s marriage.

Wright’s style is so clear and unadorned that his writing goes down like a glass of cool water. The challenge for the reader is to pick up the extremely subtle hints that get below the bland surface narrative to reveal character and emotion. Ida Lupino turns out to be one of Fielding’s favourite movie stars, a distinctly odd choice for a baby boomer. Denise’s attachment to everything Henry James ever wrote helps fill out the personality of a bright smalltown girl determined to make her mark in the world of letters.

Over the course of the week, Fielding lugs around a manuscript called “A History of Water,” which predicts a dire shortage of that resource within 30 years, and which comes to represent the unhappy collective legacy we are leaving to the next generation, just as Fielding’s lust and its aftermath will scar his daughter for years to come. Finally, after a tense confrontation with Denise’s brother Ray on the eve of her funeral, Fielding catches a glimpse of the TV news from the Middle East, where “a crowd of angry, dark-haired men in shirt sleeves” carry a coffin through the streets.

At the centre of this tightly controlled Canadian maelstrom are lies. Once back in Ontario, Fielding tells his miserable story over and over, but with two lacunae: the sex in the car and his prior glimpse of the lunatic on the beach. As readers, we know that all these details will eventually come out at the trial back in England, but until then we simply watch Fielding squirm with the weight of this sinful knowledge: “He realized that this was not a sterling moment in his life, but it was the way it had to be for now.”

Wright is a master at conveying the myriad ways humans deceive themselves into believing that what they are doing will work out for the best. It seldom does, although in Wright’s world the possibility is always left open that it might.