SYNOPSIS:

Haunted by a past he tried to escape from, Sean Doyle’s homecoming is plagued by his childhood nightmares of the Boston strangler. While watching his older brother and friends play baseball, Sean is designated the ball boy to fetch stray foul balls. As he crawls under bushes and trees behind home plate searching for a foul ball, Sean finds a dead girl. Immediately, the panic and fear that gripped Boston from numerous unsolved murders had invaded their small Cutter Park neighborhood- ending the age of innocence. Sean’s homecoming for his father’s funeral triggers the deeply buried PTSD of his youthful discovery of Pearl Lin’s body on that fateful day. Sean becomes deeply obsessed with solving the forty year old cold case. He begins to discover his childhood nightmares led to deep psychological adult trauma. As Sean begins to unravel the clues of Pearl Lin’s murder, he finds surprisingly deep coverups in the investigation that leads him down a maze of corruption from Boston’s Chinatown to Charlestown’s Irish brutality. When Sean does finally find Pearl Lin’s murderer, the discovery shakes Boston’s elite mob families to their cores- causing heads spinning. Sean’s investigation into the abuses by Catholic nuns of children won him a Pulitzer Prize, catapulting him as one of the youngest journalists to ever win. Now as he returns home for his father’s funeral, Sean’s buried childhood fears instigate a need to find the monster that stole his childhood from him and his city.