From the Book jacket:
macabre beginning? Perhaps. But the discovery of the body by two boys, Flip and Bryan, sets off a chain of events that finally ends their friendship. The two are poised perilously between childhood and adolescence, between fantasy and reality, between the daily round of the Coolidge Middle School and a paper route and the menace of the dark woods of Dreamland Lake. Flip is the aggressive organizer, determined to transform a tramp's lonely death into full- scale television-style mystery-adventure. Bryan is the reflective follower who learns to stand alone when their mutual fantasy results in authentic tragedy. Before the drama is played out to the final, terrifying conclusion, Elvan Helligrew, a born victim, is involved together with the fathers of the boys, men who inhabit a world the boys will one day enter. It is Bryan who tells the story later in an attempt to explain to himself the meaning of events involving more kinds of death than he can comprehend-or face.
Richard Peck was born in Decatur, Illinois. He attended Exeter University in England and graduated from DePauw University and Southern Illinois University. He has taught at Hunter College in New York and has served as the Assistant Director of the Council for Basic Education in Washington, D.C. He is the editor of four anthologies of contemporary writing, including SOUNDS & SILENCES and MINDSCAPES. His own poetry and articles on books, schools, and urban Jiving appear in Saturday Review, The Chicago Tribune Magazine, Parents' and The New York Times. Mr. Peck is the author of one previous novel, don't look and it won't hurt.
