There's no mystery about what happens in this beautifully rendered and heartbreaking story from O'Nan (West of Sunset). In the opening pages, teenager Angel Oliviera murders another teen, Birdy Alves. O'Nan explores what led up to the killing and paints an intimate canvas of a small Rhode Island town in 2009. Women, teenage and adult, are the focal points and the narrators: Angel's observant younger sister, Marie, sets the stage, and Birdy, Angel, and Angel's mother, Carol, tell the story through a series of flashbacks and internal monologues. Birdy is dating Hector, but she's in a clandestine relationship with Angel's boyfriend. Angel frets about her mother's desperate attempts to find love. Carol wants a better life for her daughters, but senses it's "beyond her control" (the 2009 setting underscores the economic fragility). Social media serves as the ugly catalyst for the action that slowly, inexorably escalates. O'Nan evokes the feverish excitement of young love ("She only means to kiss him goodbye but they don't know how to stop") and the truly destructive force of jealousy. This isn't a crime novel; it's a Shakespearean tragedy told in spare, poetic, insightful prose. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Co. (Mar.)

A young woman is murdered in 2009 working-class Rhode Island, and events unfold from the perspectives of characters: Angel, the murderer; Birdy, her victim; Carol, Angel's mother; and Marie, Angel's younger sister, who looks back on a tragedy spurred by Angel's and Birdy's love for the same teenage boy. From O'Nan, author of the nationally best-selling, Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist Last Night at the Lobster.

The latest from O'Nan (Henry, Himself, 2019) begins with the shocking and tragic end of a teen love triangle. Angel's longtime boyfriend Myles cheats on her with classmate Birdy. When their relationship is revealed, the reconciled Angel and Myles kill Birdy. But rather than homing in on the murder, O'Nan focuses on four women at the center of the story, alternating between the contemporaneous perspectives of Angel, Birdy, Angel's mother Carol, and Angel's 13-year-old sister, Marie. In addition, the novel is framed by the reflections of Marie as an adult looking back on the murder's reverberations within their family and their working-class Rhode Island community. Like Carol, who is constantly starting over with new boyfriends with her children in tow, young Angel and Birdy are willing to go to extremes to be loved, but Marie has a harder time making sense of her sister's crime of passion and struggles to leave the past behind. O'Nan's detailed, sympathetic portrayal of his characters and their community will appeal to fans of Elizabeth Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), Olive Kitteridge (2008), and Olive, Again (2019).

Prolific, protean O'Nan examines a familiar subject, hard-pressed working-class life in America, through the lens of a Rhode Island murder. Ashaway, Rhode Island, in 2009 is a typical postindustrial town; the mill that employed most of its residents is closed, leaving people like Carol to scrabble for a living as a nurse's aide to support her two teenage daughters. One of them, Marie, opens the novel with these words: "When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl." This is not a whodunit but an exploration of why the murder happened; O'Nan tells the story with his characteristic compassion (and artistic boldness) by inhabiting the consciousnesses of four unhappy, conflicted females. Overweight, unpopular Marie is the fearful, helpless observer. Carol wants more for her girls than she has, "but exactly how that will happen she can't imagine"--so she focuses instead on finding a new boyfriend who's better than the parade of losers who have earned her eldest daughter Angel's contempt. Angel can't see any way out either; her post-graduation future promises little beyond continuing to work in her dead-end after-school job while privileged boyfriend Myles heads for college and "she'll lose him to some rich girl." Actually, Myles is already cheating on her with Birdy, the victim-to-be, whose lovestruck perspective is the fourth narrative strand. But she's no rich girl; Birdy and Angel are more alike than different, frustrated and obsessing about a boy who doesn't seem worth it. Seen only through others' eyes, Myles' role in the ensuing tragedy remains murky. The novel's main thrust is also unclear; Marie's closing monologue suggests themes of memory and identity that weren't particularly evident as the story progressed. However, the book is rich in social detail, including the teenagers' socially networked world, and warmed by O'Nan's customary tenderness for ordinary lives. Everyday People was the title of one of his first great novels, in 2001, and depicting everyday people with sensitive acuity remains one of his principal artistic achievements here. Not one of this gifted author's best, though it's finely rendered with poignant realism. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.