Sourcebooks Landmark
Published October 6, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
At sixty-six, Elena Altieri has left behind the New York punk scene where, in her youth, she photographed the musicians who were central to a short-lived but energetic creative movement. Now she lives quietly in Vermont where she has a bad case of tinnitus and a gap in her memory. She doesn’t know what led to her fleeing to Vermont decades ago. Her placid life, teaching a few community college courses and scraping up barely enough money to keep her modest home, is disrupted when a punk musician’s obituary runs in Rolling Stone accompanied by one of her vivid photos. It has gone viral, and with the sudden fame comes a surprising offer from her agent: the Guggenheim is doing a punk exhibit and her photos will be a major part of it. She dreads returning to the city where her best friend Sin died, but needs funds to maintain her home, so agrees to go. Among the exhibits is a recreation of a famous toilet from a storied club. When she steps into it and touches the wall, she hears a woman in her death throes, screaming.
Though she wants to think it’s just an unpleasant new symptom of her tinnitus, her cousin, a medium who warned Elena the display was dangerous, is convinced she, too, has a gift passed down through their Puerto Rican forebears. As the story progresses and Elena touches more relics of her past, she hears more women’s screams. One of them, she realizes, is the voice of her friend Sin, who died of what the police believed was an accidental overdose. That never made sense to Elena, since they both had seen the effects of drugs on their community and avoided them completely. Now she begins to think someone deliberately used narcotics to murder several woman, all of whom died without much attention from the police. Who among her past acquaintances could be the killer?
Told with flashbacks that evoke the punk scene with almost photographic sharpness, Elena’s past unfolds. As she probes for evidence, that missing piece of her memory begins to emerge like a contact sheet in a developing bath, bit by bit and then all at once.
The elements of magic realism are culturally convincing as part of Elena’s world as she puts the scattered parts of her life together and finds out what really happened to Sin and the other women whose lives were discounted and ignored. As a mystery, it’s well plotted and peopled with deftly-drawn characters. As an album of the New York punk scene, it’s an evocative trip into the past.