Ask Again, Yes

Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope are two young NYPD officers who end up living next door to each other in Gillam, a suburb north of New York City. Their children, Kate Gleeson and Peter Stanhope, grow up alongside each other and fall in love as teenagers, until a single act of violence between their parents shatters both families and drives them apart. Keane follows Kate and Peter, and the wounded adults around them, across the next forty years, through addiction, untreated mental illness, estrangement, and the difficult possibility of repair. The novel is less a mystery than a study of how one night reshapes two families for a lifetime.