Every couple of years since the early 1990s, Stewart O’Nan has reliably produced a thoughtful, well-crafted novel on a diverse subject --- a mysterious epidemic in a 19th-century Wisconsin town (A PRAYER FOR THE DYING), a thriller set in post-World War II Jerusalem (CITY OF SECRETS), and even a portrait of a modest restaurant’s final day of business (LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER).

But for all this versatility, O’Nan’s literary compass consistently guides him back to the true north of his body of work --- the lives of ordinary people. That’s the case with OCEAN STATE, the story of a devastating crime committed in unimaginably mundane circumstances. It’s a novel about evil, but there are no real evildoers, an account of how the shock waves of a tragic killing reverberate in the lives of families and a community.

"OCEAN STATE is a book that easily can be consumed in a single sitting. But the speed at which many readers are likely to devour it won’t diminish their appreciation for the depth of the tragedy it portrays."

“When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl.” In that stark opening sentence, O’Nan makes it clear that there will be no mystery here about the deed, only about the path that leads to it and the consequences that ensue. Set in the small town of Ashaway, Rhode Island, around Halloween 2009, the novel recounts the killing of high school senior Birdy Alves by her classmate and romantic rival, Angel Lynn Oliviera, and the boy whose bed they shared.

O’Nan deeply inhabits the minds of Angel and Birdy, who under different circumstances easily could have been close friends. Both live in homes without a father, are dedicated athletes (volleyball/soccer), and work part-time --- one at a CVS, the other at a sandwich shop. Both clearly sense that unless they’re able to find a way out of their working class hometown, their lives are destined to replicate those of their disgruntled elders. The source of their fatal conflict is that they’re in love with the same boy --- Myles Parrish --- the handsome, guitar-playing son of a wealthy family who uses its beach house for his assignations.

As Birdy, a likable girl from a large and affectionate family of Portuguese ancestry, carries on her affair with Myles, she has to deal with her own long-term relationship with a boyfriend whose attraction she can no longer reciprocate, and her qualms over the morality of Myles’ betrayal of Angel, his girlfriend of three years. At some level, she understands that her competition with Angel isn’t being carried out on a level playing field, but she’s helpless as ordinary teenage angst metastasizes into chaos in the face of Angel’s rage.

What should have been the kind of romantic contest that unfolds harmlessly every day in every high school in America inexorably escalates as Angel remains unconvinced that she’s vanquished Birdy after she learns of Myles’ faithlessness from a photograph posted online. When simply roughing up Birdy doesn’t suffice, she and Myles hatch a plan to drive home Angel’s point more persuasively. The ineptitude of their scheme is surpassed only by their lack of skill in concealing its deadly result. “They’re amateurs --- they’re idiots, thinking they could get away with it,” O’Nan writes, revealing Angel’s state of mind as the police close in on her. “They deserve everything they get.”

Much of the novel is narrated from the third-person point of view of Angel, Birdy and Angel’s mother, Carol, a divorcée who’s employed as a nursing home aide, “someone whose dreams didn’t work out” and who “sees the future as beyond her control, random, their lives at the mercy of chance, even if they do everything right.” She’s trying to nurture a new relationship --- yet another in a succession since her divorce --- as she’s pulled between the demands of earning a living and the challenges of single parenthood.

But the novel’s most affecting passages are those in the voice of Marie, Angel’s 13-year-old-sister, who watches with a mixture of affection for her striking older sibling and dread as her family’s life unravels. Marie is a studious, overweight adolescent who’s often consigned to the nearby home of her grandmother or to caretaking for a neighborhood girl with Down syndrome. She’s a perceptive observer who loves her sister and yet is powerless in the face of the tragedy that’s unfolding before her eyes. O’Nan beautifully captures Marie’s pain early in the novel, as she describes an evening at home with Angel watching the movie Mystic Pizza and eating popcorn as the search for Birdy’s killer proceeds, even as she knows their world soon will collapse around them:

“We weren’t happy that fall, in that rotting, underwater house, with everything we’d already lost, and everything still to come, but lying safe and warm under my grandmother’s afghan, eating popcorn and stealing glances at my funny, beautiful sister as the light played over her face. I wished we could stay there forever.”

That heartbreaking passage is only one of many examples of Stewart O’Nan’s talent for forging an emotional connection between his characters and his audience. OCEAN STATE is a book that easily can be consumed in a single sitting. But the speed at which many readers are likely to devour it won’t diminish their appreciation for the depth of the tragedy it portrays.