When a fourteen-year-old girl is the alleged victim of a terrible act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanises her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades. Unfolding in a chorus of multiracial voices from the police to the media to the victim and her family which gather to reach a tense crescendo at the novel's climax, this title offers a shocking new understanding of power and oppression, innocence and guilt, truth and sensationalism, justice and retribution and the primal decisions we make to protect those we love.