The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo A Novel

Ginny Lavoie has just been suspended from her job with the NYPD when she gets a late-night phone call from her childhood best friend whose teenage son, Danny, was savagely beaten to death. Now, Ginny is back in the scruffy New England mill town she left more than a decade before to solve the murder of this handsome, popular boy. But as she tried to untangle the secrets and lies simmering beneath the town's surface, Ginny must confront childhood ghosts and new demons. Having sworn to find Danny's killer, she sifts through suspects ranging from the town's resident homeless Vietnam vet to Manhattan hipsters to Danny's own stepfather. But when the town's first murder in recent memory gives way to a second and then a third, Ginny must race to find the killer's identity - before she becomes victim no. 4.

Peter Orner has received many honors for his fiction, including the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize from the Foundation of Jewish Culture, and a 2006 Guggenheim fellowship