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Can vengeance wipe away the dark shadows of the past? Two corpses--one suicide, the other murder--emerge through the Long Lake ice ten years apart yet linked by a St. Louis bootlegger's killing three decades earlier. Those dramatic events frame twelve-year-old A.J. Nowak's search for identity after being orphaned by World War II and its long shadow. He struggles to overcome dark family history, his explosive anger, his bootlegger and loan shark father's D-Day death, and his widowed mother's desperate self-destruction to safeguard A.J.'s legacy from a blackmailer. Ultimately, A.J. faces a self-defining decision: whether to avenge her death by his own hand.
About the author
A former newspaper reporter, Rick Skwiot is the author of six previously published works-- four novels and two memoirs-- that have won praise from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and major newspapers. His debut novel Death in Mexico won Florida's Hemingway First Novel Award and his second book, Sleeping With Pancho Villa, was a finalist for the Willa Cather Fiction Prize. His urban mystery Fail was a St. Louis Post-Dispatch notable book for 2014. He's taught postgraduate fiction writing at Washington University in St. Louis and at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he served as Distinguished Visiting Writer.
