Juliet Adair Pritner
The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous lives. The couple's children, ten-year-old Biscuit and thirteen-year-old Paul, responding to the unnamed tensions around them, begin to act out in exquisitely idiosyncratic ways. But as the family members scatter into private, isolating grief, an unexpected visitor arrives, and they find themselves growing more alert to the hurt, humor, warmth, and burdens of others—to the grief that is part of every human life but that also carries within it the power to draw us together.
Jimmy Kilmartin is an ex-con living in Astoria in the New York City borough of Queens, trying to stay clean and raising a family with his wife Bev. But when his cousin Ronnie causes him to take a fall for driving an illegal transport of stolen cars, a police officer named Calvin Hart is injured and Jimmy lands back in prison. In exchange for an early release, he is asked to help bring down a local crime boss named Little Junior Brown. Jimmy remarries and attempts to renew a relationship with his child. But he is sent undercover by Detective Hart to work with Junior and infiltrate his operations. As soon as Little Junior kills an undercover federal agent with Jimmy watching, the unscrupulous district attorney and the feds further complicate his life. He must take down Junior or face the consequences.
