Meet Jake Flynn.
Jake grew up in Connecticut with a father who seemed to have life figured out. He was an attorney, a fixer, a peacemaker, the kind of man who always knew exactly what to say and how to make an impact. Jake? His life hasn't exactly followed that blueprint. He's overworked and underpaid at a remote tech job where the line between work and home has completely disappeared. His wife is burned out, and they have two young children. Now, his parents need help, and Jake desperately wants what seems like such a reasonable thing: a house, some stability, the American Dream. Surely a wife, two kids and a job are enough to make a person feel like they've made it, right? Nope.
Jake packs up his family and heads back to his Connecticut hometown, and suddenly the past is everywhere. Old memories resurface and people from his past reappear. The most unlikely group of people are now in his orbit, and life is about to get interesting. His elderly neighbor Edwina is a local historian with a peculiar neighborhood newsletter, her son Eddie is an aspiring artist with a talent for bad decisions (emphasis on bad), and fifteen-year-old Trevor is a lonely kid trying to protect his family. Then there's an old cemetery with three mausoleums holding valuables, secrets and an opportunity that is just too tempting for the wrong people. Somehow, Jake ends up in the middle of it all. Literally and figuratively.
He's caught between his wife and children, his parents, his job, his responsibilities, his desire for a home, Eddie's schemes and Trevor's vulnerability. Jake isn't a mastermind or a hardened criminal. He's an ordinary guy who keeps finding himself in the middle of other people's problems making one questionable decision at a time. Brendan Flaherty takes that very ordinary desperation and turns it into a darkly funny, wonderfully offbeat crime story about family, money, responsibility and just how easily a decent person can find himself standing somewhere he never intended to be. I loved that this isn't a story about some impossibly badass hero saving the day. Jake feels real. He's messy, overwhelmed, well intentioned and occasionally spectacularly misguided. Honestly - that made me root for him even when I wanted to shake him.
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