This is a book about tribes—found families who put their backs together and face outward, defending themselves against invaders—and how toxic they can become. It’s also a book of grace notes and details. A broken bottle of perfume whose scent still haunts a garage thirty-five years later. An incongruous flowered curtain that acquires menace as the reader slowly realizes what it conceals. And a murdered man whose last thoughts, as he’s stabbed to death on Nostrand Avenue, are not of fighting back but of a trip he once took with his wife. The way she looked, paddling clumsily at the bow. Of her
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