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Synopsis

On 11 March 1963, the lives of a black cleaner, an Italian-American carpenter and a Jewish housewife collided in the leafy Boston suburb of Belmont. These three people did not know each other, but, by the end of the day, the housewife had been raped and strangled, the cleaner had been arrested on suspicion of being the notorious Boston Strangler, and the man who later admitted to being the real Strangler - carpenter Al DeSalvo - had returned home to his wife and children.

Unwittingly drawn into the brutal drama were one-year-old Sebastian Junger's own family, who, on the completion of some work De Salvo had been doing for weeks on their hose, posed for a photograph with him the day after the Belmont strangling. Taking this chilling family snap as his inspiration, Junger explores the worlds of the three protagonists and creates a vivid portrait of 1960s America that touches on the historic themes of that era: the assassination of JFK and the troubling race relations that prefigured the death of Martin Luther King.

This new work by Sebastian Junger, acclaimed author of the bestselling The Perfect Storm, is, like that first book, as enlightening as it is haunting.