The brutal murder of two teenage girls the summer after Nora Cunningham's junior year in high school is a life-changing shock for Nora and an entire community. Based on an actual crime in 1955, this novel is at once a mystery and a coming of age story. Nora feels the certainties of her life--her friendships, her religion, her prudence, her resolve to find a boyfriend taller than she is--thrown into turmoil. Most people in Elmgrove, Maryland, share the comforting conviction that Buddy Novak, an unpopular boy who had every reason to want his ex-girlfriend dead, is responsible for the killings. Nora agrees at first, then begins to doubt Buddy's guilt, and finally comes to believe him innocent--the lone dissenting voice among her friends and all the adults in town. Told from several different perspectives, including that of the murderer, the real story is gradually revealed to the reader. Author Mary Downing Hahn grew up in Maryland in the 1950s; acclaimed for her ghost stories, she considers this novel an attempt to exorcise some ghosts from her own life.