Elizabeth Bloom's noirish novel about a suspended policewoman returning home to investigate the murder of her best friend's son is now in paperback. Evicted from her apartment, suspended by the NYPD, betrayed by her lover, Ginny Lavoie thinks she can't sink any lower. Then she gets a late-night phone call consisting of two awful words: 'Danny's dead.' That message, a plea from her childhood best friend to solve the murder of her handsome, popular teenage son, brings Ginny back to the scruffy New England mill town she left more than a decade before. But as she tries to untangle the secrets and lies simmering beneath the surface of an insular community, she finds that the town is no longer exactly as she remembers it. As she searches for the truth, she sifts through suspects ranging from the town's resident homeless Vietnam vet to Manhattan hipsters to Danny's own stepfather - and tries to avoid becoming victim number four. But the attempts on her life aren't the most frightening part of Ginny's homecoming. No, that's facing the boy she left behind: her high-school sweetheart, a man who was content to spend his life in the small town she couldn't wait to leave.
