Tom Cahill thinks the two voices on the harassing phone calls he’s been receiving are actually one person. But they are indeed different predators: Eddie Branagan, telling him what he’s going to do to his daughter Laura; Phil LaPorta, painting a picture of how great a man Tom, a newspaper columnist, really is.

Because the novel cuts back and forth between otherwise total strangers suspense is rendered all the more palpable; and the place, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, shows its many sides in and out of our colective American past. Beetlebomb is a pan through mundane time and place, written in opposition to the otherwise unspoken sources of human shame and brutality.

The Bay Ridge Novels of Larry Kearney weave their intensely enjoyable readability through a nostalgia premised in ’50s early ‘60s New York re-encountering the existentialism and rawness of perennial youth. As in his influential and much-lauded poetry, Kearney maintains an imaginative correspondence to his early citizenry, carried through fire and crime, straight forward out of the old American century.

These unforgettably thrilling tales of precocious young lives thrown to their overlapping fates animate as yet untested characters—surprisingly adaptable and resilient—and anxiously pits them against the foreshadows of cosmopolitan struggle, the brutal claims of fallen obsession, last-gasp redemption, and ultimately, the possibility and poignancy of collective forgiveness. .