Opening
Under the El in Kensington, police officer Michaela 'Mickey' Fitzpatrick finds a body and prays it isn’t her estranged sister, Kacey Fitzpatrick. A flashback to their teenage years shows the first time Mickey “found my sister dead,” fusing a present-day homicide with a family history steeped in addiction, loyalty, and fear.
What Happens
Chapter 1: NOW
Mickey and her new partner, Eddie Lafferty, get a call: a woman is down on the Gurney Street tracks. Mickey’s first thought snaps into place—What if it’s Kacey?—before she shoves it down and corrects Lafferty’s shaky radio work. She sizes him up as a “phony,” notes her own clear-eyed self-assessment (poor, stubborn, cautious, not stupid), and registers that financial help from Simon Cleare has recently dried up.
Driving through Kensington, Mickey maps the neighborhood’s fall from industry to epicenter of the opioid crisis. The El throws the Ave into permanent dusk; dealers, users, and sex work edge every corner. She spots Paula Mulroney working alone and realizes she hasn’t seen Kacey for a long time. Lafferty prods at small talk and learns Mickey has a four-year-old, Thomas Fitzpatrick, and that her longtime partner, Truman Dawes, is out on medical leave.
At the Lehigh Viaduct, the job is grimly routine—another overdose, it seems—until it isn’t. The victim lies on her back, eyes open in astonishment. Mickey’s first surge is relief: “She’s not Kacey.” Then training takes over. She spots a spray of tiny pink dots beneath the eyebrows—petechiae—evidence of strangulation. She radios in a possible homicide, and the mystery begins.
Chapter 2: THEN
Summer 2002. Mickey remembers the first time she “found my sister dead.” Sixteen-year-old Kacey vanishes for a weekend; seventeen-year-old Mickey, already the responsible one, pleads with their grandmother, Gee, to call the police. Gee hesitates. Kacey—boisterous, magnetic, newly secretive—has been slipping into drinking and pills, and the sisters’ once inseparable bond now hums with silence.
After two days, Paula pages Mickey and leads her to a sweltering, trashed rowhome. Upstairs, Kacey lies blue and limp on a bare mattress, a syringe by her side. Mickey screams for help. Paula acts: she hoists Kacey and carries her outside, where a cop spots them and calls an ambulance.
In the ambulance, Narcan drags Kacey back the way a tide drags wreckage—violently. She wakes cursing, desperate, begging to “go back.” For Mickey, the moment crystallizes a grim truth that will shape her police work: some people lost to addiction do not want to be saved. The hatred in Kacey’s eyes becomes a look Mickey will come to know on countless revivals.
Character Development
The dual timeline clarifies how Mickey’s professional composure grows from personal catastrophe: every call about a body is also a call about her sister.
- Mickey: Competent, restrained, and hyper-observant; her instinct to protect collides with her duty to investigate. Financial strain and single parenthood sharpen her isolation.
- Kacey: First an absence in the present, then a vivid, reckless teen in the past whose overdose becomes the family’s defining trauma.
- Lafferty: Nervous, talkative rookie; his naivete highlights Mickey’s hard-won control and solitude.
- Paula: A woman on the Ave in the present, a fierce, quick-thinking savior in the past—her loyalty to the sisters complicates any single label of “victim” or “user.”
- Gee: Loving but wary of the police; her reluctance frames the family’s long history of managing crisis alone.
Themes & Symbols
The chapters braid Family Bonds and Dysfunction with Addiction and Its Consequences. Mickey’s work life and personal terror are inseparable: every alley might hold evidence—and Kacey. The flashback shows love as persistence through betrayal and relapse, not a cure, and traces how that love hardens into vigilance.
The structure enacts The Unescapable Past. “NOW” is never free from “THEN”; Mickey’s educated eye for petechiae grows from the shock of Narcan’s violence and Kacey’s refusal to be saved. The Lehigh Viaduct—the Tracks—functions as a symbol of decay and erasure, a place that has “lost its purpose” and now shelters the city’s most hidden harms. As a liminal zone, it’s where the line between overdose and murder blurs.
Key Quotes
“She’s not Kacey.”
Mickey’s flash of relief exposes the story’s central tension: professional calm rides on top of personal panic. The line sets the stakes—every dead woman could be her sister—and foreshadows Mickey’s inability to separate the case from her life.
“The first time I ‘found my sister dead.’”
Framing the flashback with this phrase turns memory into an ongoing present. It signals trauma as a loop and primes the reader to see the homicide investigation as a continuation of a long, intimate disaster.
“Go back.”
Kacey’s plea on revival compresses the physiology of withdrawal and the psychology of addiction into two words. It reframes rescue as violence from the user’s perspective and haunts Mickey’s later revivals on the job.
A place that has “lost its purpose.”
This description of the Tracks turns setting into symbol: deindustrialization leaves a vacuum filled by illicit economies and hidden deaths. The homicide on ground assumed to be overdose territory announces that not everything here is accidental.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters launch the crime plot—a likely strangulation on overdose ground—while locking it to Mickey’s most private fear: finding Kacey too late. The dual timeline builds momentum and motive, suggesting that the solutions to the present are buried in the sisters’ past. Kensington’s vivid, oppressive atmosphere becomes a character of its own, shaping choices and outcomes. Together, “NOW” and “THEN” establish the novel’s core conflict: Mickey’s duty to investigate versus her compulsion to find and protect Kacey, in a city where personal catastrophe and systemic failure are inseparable.