Traveler

I finished reading "Traveler" by Ron McLarty

ABOUT THE BOOK

For Jono Riley, East Providence in the 1960s was filled with hockey games, Marlboros, scout camp, beautiful young girls, and best friends. Growing up in blue-collar families, Jono and his three friends—Cubby, Billy, and Bobby—were inseparable and formed a bond that each of them thought would last a lifetime. But inevitably things changed as time moved on. When he receives a letter from Cubby thirty years later, Jono is living in Manhattan, working as a part-time actor and bartender, and he has not been back to East Providence in decades. In the letter, Cubby informs Jono that Marie D’Agostino, Cubby’s sister and the first girl that Jono ever loved, has died suddenly. This news inspires a range of emotions and memories in Jono’s mind, and he decides that it is time he journeyed back to the town of his youth. As Jono revisits East Providence, he is also struggling with a question in his present life: he has fallen in love with Renée Levesque, a New York City firefighter who wants to move in with him, but Jono harbors fears and reservations about making such a commitment. When he arrives in East Providence, Jono discovers that Marie’s death was actually linked to a childhood event that he recalls with clarity: one winter afternoon, when Jono was eleven years old and Marie twelve, she was mysteriously shot by an unseen gunman while they were walking home. The doctors were unable to remove the bullet, but Marie recovered—until, at age fifty-two, the bullet “traveled” from the place it was originally lodged, pinching an artery and causing her death. As Jono revisits old friends and neighbors, he comes across Officer Kenny Snowden, who investigated Marie’s shooting at the time, and who tells Jono that there have been other unexplained shootings over the years. As Jono, who is joined by the determined and beautiful Renée, helps Snowden look deeper into these shootings and tries to figure out how these incidents relate to his own life, he comes to terms with his memories and realizes that nothing will ever be the same again. Interwoven into his search for the truth are scenes from his childhood, as Jono finds himself caught up in girl trouble, suffers the death of his father, tries to avoid fights with neighborhood bullies, and emerges victorious as a star hockey player.