As in Mirror Lake and I'll Never Be Long Gone, Greene deals with the theme of paternal loss to striking effect in his third novel, a book as incandescent as it is disturbing. Seventeen-year-old Anthony Lopes, who lives with his mother in the working-class town of Galilee, R.I., has prepared himself for a life at sea, like his late fisherman father before him. Yet one night, he and his best friend decide to rob the house of a wealthy lady, who's recently deceased, and his life goes irreversibly wrong. During the robbery, Anthony is hypnotized by a young woman's silhouette at the top of the stairs and doesn't see her father crouched in the darkness. In the struggle, the man falls from the staircase and is killed. Horrified and filled with remorse, Anthony becomes obsessed with the girl, Hannah Forbes, and begins a tortured, all-consuming odyssey to earn her forgiveness and convince her of his love.
