1989. A farm outside Sycamore, Illinois. Tony Keating is almost fourteen—invisible, angry, and beginning to understand why.

His father is two years dead, killed in what everyone calls an accident. His grandmother rules the house with a cold hand and a cane. His mother survives by not fighting back. Tony survives by keeping his head down—until the spring day Jake Beale moves in down the road, and wanting nothing stops being an option.

What happens between Tony and Jake that spring and summer is first love in its truest form: tentative, electric, overwhelming. It is also, in rural Illinois in 1989, deeply dangerous. When the wrong people find out, Tony loses everything—Jake, his home, any chance of going back. Forced out and sent to a boys' home in Chicago, he has to figure out who he is when the life he knew is gone.

What follows is Tony's real education. In survival. In Chicago. In the men who use him and the rare ones who don't. As Kit Foxx—escort, survivor, businessman—he builds a life from nothing, in the shadow of the AIDS crisis, in a city that asks nothing of him except that he stay alive.

But underneath everything, a question won't let go: what really happened to his father? The relatives called it an accident. Tony has never believed them. And as the years pass and the pieces surface—slowly, one by one, like something in an Agatha Christie novel—the answer turns out to be far more dangerous than he imagined, and far closer to home.

Sycamore Boy is a coming-of-age novel, a survival story, and a mystery woven through both—a book about first love, chosen family, and the long, hard road back to yourself.

[Cover design by Stephan Smith, Smith Creative Group]