Can vengeance wipe away the dark shadows of the past?
Two corpses—one suicide, the other murder—emerge through the Long Lake ice ten years apart yet linked by a St. Louis bootlegger's killing three decades earlier. Those dramatic events frame twelve-year-old A.J. Nowak's search for identity after being orphaned by World War II and its long shadow. He struggles to overcome dark family history, his explosive anger, his bootlegger and loan shark father's D-Day death, and his widowed mother's desperate self-destruction to safeguard A.J.'s legacy from a blackmailer. Ultimately, A.J. faces a self-defining decision: whether to avenge her death by his own hand.