Wolves of Summer

A girl goes missing in a Rhode Island beach community, revealing the secrets local women have been expected to keep—from the bestselling author of The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano and Her One Regret.

July 1979: The Rhode Island beach town of Bonnet is shaken to its core when local 12-year-old Christina Grove disappears. The tight-knit community is still reeling from a series of home invasion burglaries the previous summer, and this new crime threatens to collapse the summer paradise’s whole economy.

Everyone comes out to help find her: from Bonnet royalty—like Joan Mansolillo, whose husband’s family owns the town’s beach resort—to working-class neighbors who pick up Dunkin Donuts for the search parties. Christina’s 15-year-old sister, Maddie, is riddled with guilt—was Christina out on her bike trying to find her sister the night she didn’t come home? The Groves’ next-door neighbor, twenty-one-year-old criminal justice student Diana González, works part-time at the Narragansett police department, and is immediately assigned to assist the detectives working Christina’s case. Diana knows that Bonnet’s idyllic veneer conceals an ugly underbelly: the entrenched class privilege that favors a few and traps the rest, knotting all the residents together in a web of personal vendettas and broken hearts. Everyone survives the system by keeping secrets—everyone from Maddie Grove to Joan Manzollilo. But now a little girl’s life is at stake—if the truth came out, could it save Christina Grove’s life? Or would it bring the whole community crashing down on itself?Donna Freitas is the author of a number of award-winning, critically acclaimed books, including the novel The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano (published in twenty languages), the memoirs Consent and Wishful Thinking, and over a dozen novels for children and young adults. Her first Ocean State Thriller, Her One Regret, was a Book of the Month Club selection. She has a Ph.D. in Gender Studies and Religion and teaches creative writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Sunday Times, and many other newspapers and magazines, and she has been interviewed on The Today Show, CNN, and All Things Considered. A native Rhode Islander, she splits her time between the US and Barcelona.