The Last Good Summer

Twenty years ago, Rue Halstead walked down to the harbor in Rockport, Massachusetts, shared a breakfast sandwich with her best friend and was never seen again. The town decided she'd run away. She'd been unhappy at home, had talked about leaving, had cash in a sock in her drawer. The math was easy if you didn't look too hard. Nora looked hard for years. Then she stopped-the way you stop looking for something when the looking keeps coming up empty and the rest of your life needs to be lived.
She became a fourth-grade teacher. She bought a house. She kept a shoebox on the top shelf of her closet. Then a letter arrives from Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, and the man who writes it is Rue's brother Denny, and he says, "There's something you deserve to know."The Last Good Summer is a story about what happened to a girl whose own mother couldn't protect her-and about the best friend who spent twenty years carrying a question that finally, painfully, gets an answer.
Set on the rocky Massachusetts coast, it's a novella about grief and justice and what it means to go looking for someone who can no longer look for themselves. The crime was real. The motive will gut you.