A page-turner about the murder of a teenage girl, from the author ofLacy Eye.

On a cold December day in northern upstate New York, the body of high school senior Joy Enright is discovered in the woods at the edge of a pond. She had been presumed drowned, but an autopsy shows that she was, in fact, strangled. As the investigation unfolds, four characters tell the story from widely divergent perspectives: Susanne, Joy's mother and a professor at the local art college; Martin, a black graduate student suspected of the murder; Harper, Joy's best friend and a potential eyewitness; and Tom, a rescue diver and son-in-law of the town's police chief. As a web of small-town secrets comes to light, a dramatic conclusion reveals the truth about Joy's death.

 

Jessica Treadway is the author of Lacy Eye, And Give You Peace, and two story collections, Absent Without Leave and Other Stories and Please Come Back to Me, which received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. A professor at Emerson College in Boston, she lives with her husband in Lexington, Massachusetts.