Unburying history can have unintended consequences.

In Brooklyn Bones, a crime of the past comes much too close to home when Erica Donato’s teenage daughter Chris finds a skeleton behind a wall in their crumbling Park Slope home. Erica–a young widow, overage history PhD candidate, and product of blue-collar Brooklyn–is drawn into the mystery when she learns that the skeleton is of an unknown teenage girl and that it was hidden there within living memory. Erica and Chris are both touched and disturbed by the mysterious tragedy in their own home.

With her daughter’s dangerous curiosity and her own work at a local history museum, Erica follows leads about the mysterious skeleton right back to her own neighborhood in its edgy, pregentrification days, the period when the age of Aquarius was turning dark. Now she finds that a cranky retired reporter wants to share old files, the charming widow of a slumlord has some surprises for her, and the crazy old lady who hangs around her street keeps trying to tell her something. Finally, there are some people–including ones she is close to–who know the whole story and will stop at nothing to make sure it stays buried forever.

Erica Donato–Brooklyn girl, urban history grad student, and single mom–is researching the 1930s when Brownsville was the home of the notorious organized criminals the newspapers called Murder, Inc. She quickly learns that even in rapidly changing Brooklyn, Brownsville remains much as it was. It is still poor, it is still tough, and it still breeds fighters and gangs. Doing field research, Erica stops in at the landmark local library and meets Savanna, a young woman who is the pride of her mother and her bosses, and headed for an elite college and a future. A few days later, Savanna is found beaten and left for dead. Her anguished mother is everywhere, insisting someone knows something. After a massive, angry demonstration, a young girlfriend of Savanna’s is found dead. Is there a connection? Did perfect Savanna have a few secrets? Erica’s curious. But she’s focused on the 1930s and has located a few women who are happy to share memories. Two are childhood friends who disagree on much but guard secrets, too–ones kept for a lifetime. Never one to resist looking deeper than her research requires, Erica encounters an apparently derelict white man, a vengeful rejected girlfriend, the role of boxing as a way out of poverty, and fading evidence of long-ago crimes.