In the first installment of Avon’s series, a young man struggles to establish a career and navigate a fraught new romantic relationship while reeling from the loss of his mother.

When readers first meet 30-year-old Mario, the protagonist is contemplatively smoking a cigarette as he waves to the mortician ferrying away his mother’s body. With his father long since out of the picture—even if Mario knows just where to find him—and his mother recently dead, Mario is now effectively an orphan. In his younger, better days, when he was living in the nice part of town, Mario was one of the cool kids at school, a football quarterback from a well-to-do family who harbored dreams of one day becoming a chef. Now, left by his parents’ divorce and mother’s death in dire straits and living quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks, those dreams seem like a thing of the past, no matter how much Mario knows his mother would want him to chase after his ambitions. Whether for his own satisfaction or to honor his dead mother, Mario humbles himself before his father by asking for a job at his restaurant, but he is insulted by the dishwasher position he’s offered. Mario soon lucks into a different opportunity: He meets Dean (friends call him “Dito”), owner of Dean’s Pizzeria, where he soon begins to work as a cook. Things are looking up, and soon Mario even meets a girl—Teresa, or, as friends call her, “Tess.” As if her beauty weren’t enough to attract Mario, Tess comes from the other, ‘better’ side of town and reminds him of his old life, when times were easier. But as in so many romances that seem, at first, too good to be true, there is trouble; Tess is harboring dark secrets that threaten to derail the hard-fought progress Mario has achieved for himself.

Avon’s novel is teeming with characters readers will feel they have seen before: an ambitious young man with a worthless, selfish father; a loving, long-suffering mother; a pretty girl with a checkered past. While at first readers may fear clichés abound, the author deftly leans on her command of setting to inform the characters, as seen here in a description of the apartment Mario’s mother left behind: “The story [she had been reading] without an audience had been eternally suspended, like a movie reel that snaps in the middle of the film’s denouement. On the bedroom dresser, a full bottle of baby powder was tipped on its side, spilling its guts. Clothes hung on their hangers; emaciated shells craving a human.” Avon’s evocative language carries the day here, and while there are passages that skirt overwriting (the phrase “feculent with impurity” appears in the novel’s opening sentence, for example), the vivid prose, in combination with the natural tension of a burgeoning love story pressurized by the secrets young lovers hide from one another, makes this novel stand out in a crowded field of suspenseful romance tales.

A well-written novel sure to satisfy fans of small-town romances with a touch of danger.