A heartrending follow-up to National Book Award Finalist Kim Addonizio's lavishly praised and much beloved novel, Little Beauties.

Rita Jackson is a young woman on the skids, spending her time in shelters and on the dot-com-drunk streets of late 1990s San Francisco. She's a young woman haunted by the murder of her mother when she was thirteen, and a young bride haunted by the disappearance of her husband, Jimmy, who split ater a nasy argument more than a year earlier. Together Jimmy and Rita were slipping into drugs and hard times. Rita is filled with feelings of guilt and failure, and the hope that she will one day find Jimmy. She doesn't know that he is still in the ciy, still in love with her, waiting tables in an expensive restaurant while trying to get a foothold in the straight life.

When Rita witnesses the atermath of a murder, her own life is endangered. She becomes involved with Gary Shepard, a married criminal investigator drawn to the dark side of this young woman. What unfolds is a story of three lawed people struggling with themselves as much as with their circumstances, as each of them is pulled more deeply and dangerously into the consequences of their decisions. When a drunken night leads Jimmy to jeopardize his second and last chance, it seems unlikely that these sweet, damaged people will ever come to anything, let alone find and -- miracle of miracles -- save one another.

But fate, in Addonizio's hands, works in strange and beautiful geometries. And redemption, she tells us, is never impossible.