George Diener, Globe War II veteran and journeying salesman, and his wife, Carol, had old-fashioned ideals and common aspirations: a house, a family, the pleasure of watching their two sons grow up. But in Feb 1972, an unthinkable tragedy occurred in the basement of their Nassau State home, shattering their hopes and dreams permanently.

George and Carol doted on their shy eldest boy, Richie. But at fifteen, the young man fell right into a devastating downward spiral. He started smoking cigarettes weed, about Richie: A Father, His Son, and the Ultimate American Tragedy shoplifting, and getting together with medication sellers, and was soon caught for assault and expelled from school. By enough time his parents sought psychiatric counseling for their boy, Richie was dependent on barbiturates and given to violent outbursts and threats. The young man George and Carol understood was over. Then, one wintertime evening, Richie arrived at his dad having a steak blade and a suicidal cry of ‘Shoot!’

Edgar Award-winning writer Thomas Thompson delivers a ‘scary, harrowing’ accounts of the turbulent era in American background when the gulf between youthful and previous, bohemian and conservative, felt wider and more threatening than ever before (the New York Times Reserve Review).