Jono Riley is an aging bartender and part-time actor in Manhattan who specializes in one-character plays, usually performed in front of an audience in the single digit. He still lives by himself in an Upper East Side walk-up, and though he's got a great girlfriend, a firefighter named Renee, his life is stuck and his acting career going nowhere fast. As the novel opens, news of the sudden death of his childhood friend Marie D'Agostino - his first true love - compels Jono to return for a few days to the place he grew up, the working-class neighborhoods of East Providence, Rhode Island.McLarty weaves the story of Jono's return with that of his coming-of-age in the early 1960s with his three best friends including the story of a series of mysterious shootings that occurred back then, one of which lodged a bullet in Marie's back when she was twelve.When Renee joins Jono is East Providence, they find themselves drawn into an attempt to find the person responsible for the shootings so long ago. As the surprising truth emerges, Jono is forced to come to terms with a past that was not quite what he remembers, even as he makes new resolutions in the present. Read Less