This novel was inspired by a real-life Baltimore homicide, the story of a man who shot and killed a 13-year-old boy who had thrown rocks at his car. But it also drew on what I learned from covering social services and poverty for five years in the early 1990s. An elderly man who has served his sentence for shooting a young boy asks Tess to find the four children who witnessed the murder, saying he wants to make restitution to them. But as soon as Tess starts to find these eyewitnesses, now teen-agers, they start dying...