The secrets of small-town life can be more deadly than fist fights and dead junkies . . . Cass Neary is not afraid of living on the edge. A photographer whose shots of New York's punk scene in the seventies earned her fame, cach , and a cultish kind of cool, Cass has spent much of her life in the dark, watching and waiting. But thirty years later she is alone, adrift and falling rapidly into oblivion. So when an old acquaintance asks her to interview a fellow photographer - a notorious recluse who lives on an island off the Maine coast - she accepts. There, she learns about a decades-old crime that is still claiming new victims - and comes to realise that her days of living dangerously are not over yet: amid this inhospitable hinterland, Cass comes to realise that her final shot might also be a shot at redemption. Patricia Highsmith meets Patti Smith in this mesmerizing literary thriller.