Innocence Lost: Death and trauma in the “coming of age” novel

Here’s the premise: two sixteen-year-olds, best buddies, are out camping alone in local woods when they stumble across a body in a shallow grave. First off, they recognize the victim. Second, one finds something near the grave that could tie one or both of their fathers to the scene. He pockets the evidence and doesn’t tell his friend. Now, both boys have some serious thinking to do and decisions to make.

That was the kernel of a story which I’ve now turned into my latest novel, Little Sins. I’ve also taken the possibly risky step of setting it in my hometown in Rhode Island. That doesn’t mean it’s autobiographical (and I certainly wasn’t aware of any murder there growing up) but it does make the setting all the more real. Mining your personal memories can provide a much deeper level of detail and clarity for describing people and places at a given point in time. It also made Little Sins a lot of fun to write. The “peek” you see here of the book’s forthcoming cover also gives a clue about the setting.

There are also some darkly serious elements in the novel which I won’t spoil here. And I’m talking about more than a suspected murder.  I’ll save exploring those for a later blog post. Suffice to say, it’s an adult story through the eyes of an adolescent, and one I hope will appeal to readers who might like to reflect on their younger selves and remember the challenges of growing up. It was never easy, was it?

I’ve been influenced by some great writers who have tackled the “coming of age” theme. Stephen King nails teenage angst and trauma with his truthful dialogue and characters in the novella The Body, later turned into the moving film Stand by Me directed by Rob Reiner. Dennis Lehane’s brilliant prose sparkles in Mystic River, a novel which tackles tragic themes and is set across two timelines: a dark past for the teens involved and a present that haunts those who survived. Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon, has also garnered high praise for its veracity of time and place and for its heartfelt tone as it explores themes of good and evil and personal loss. Looking further back in time, there’s the classic Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, published in 1962, which uses horror and fantasy to eloquently explore very real themes about fears in adolescence and of growing up.

I’m sure all of these authors leveraged their personal experiences of hometowns and memories of their own pasts to create these books. And it’s the looking back – with the wisdom of having more than a few years under your belt – that makes the dialogue so believable and truthful even when it comes from the mouths of teenagers on the page.

Little Sins will be published in March 2026 and will be available for preorder in January on Amazon.