After Lyletown

This remarkable cautionary tale from Bostonian Frederick (the PEN/Winship Award-winning Inland) finds restless grad student Alan Ripley joining a passionate art teacher in a scheme to heist weapons for black militants in 1968. The Lyletown Five include threatening ex-con Rory Dekker, and, not surprisingly, the heist goes awry. A burst appendix keeps Alan from playing his role (though it doesn't spare him from feeling guilty for life), resulting in one person dead and Rory in prison. Twenty years later, the middle-aged Alan is a Boston attorney and suburban family man who is not entirely happy when Rory shows up asking for money. Alan gives him a loan and Rory pays it back%E2%80%94with 20% interest. Two years later he shows up again, this time in serious trouble, and Alan lets him hide in his family's rural cabin. Frederick frames his novel around intriguing crime fiction tropes, but his pacing is deliberate and the contemplation much deeper than is usually found in the genre, resulting in an absorbing examination of how violence can alter lives for years, no matter what the ideology fueling it. (July)