In Michael Oren’s beautifully rendered novel, an unsuspecting coach and guidance counselor gets drawn into an illicit relationship and a macabre murder mystery in 1970s suburbia.

Sandy Cooper lives an uneventful life as a guidance counselor and coach in a suburban junior high school. Uneventful, that is, until a word of advice to a troubled student embroils him in a forbidden relationship and the exposure of a twisted murder. In this compulsively readable novel reminiscent of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, Michael Oren evokes a time of racial, political, and social turmoil in the 1970s.