Mary McGarry Morris

This is the moving and powerful story of innocence and betrayal told in the endearingly wise voice of thirteen-year-old Nellie Peck. It is early summer, and her beloved father's business is failing. Forced to take care of her shy younger brother, Nellie is determined to make him--and herself--toughen up. Three strangers enter Nellie's protected life: mysterious and brutish Max Devaney works in her grandfather's junkyard, the thieving Bucky Saltonstall...

A boy sees a man commit a murder, then later that day the murderer calls on his mother with flowers. So begins the tense tale of a con man exploiting a love-starved woman, with an alcoholic husband and three children, and a boy who keeps a murder secret to avoid ruining his mother's happiness. The setting is a small town in Vermont, the time the 1960s.

A man returns to his hometown after twenty-five years in prison, in this "richly atmospheric" novel by the acclaimed author of Songs in Ordinary Time (The Washington Post). After decades in prison for a senseless juvenile murder, Gordon Loomis returns home to find his old neighborhood blighted by drugs and poverty. Desperate for work, he takes a job at the same rundown market where he once stocked shelves as a teenager. But while Gordon's situation...