Blue Hole — G.D. Gearino

Tallasee Tynan is a photographer, not a detective, so she's reluctant to get involved in a missing-person search. But when an old woman asks her to look for a wayward grandson, Tallasee agrees. But it's her troubled young friend Charley Selkirk who puts the pieces together, not only learning what happened to the missing grandson but learning something about himself as well.
Charley, a self-described “high school kick-out” (not a dropout; he likes to be clear about that), has had a bad summer. It's 1969, and Charley has been thrown out of his newly integrated school for defending a black student a little too vigorously against the torment of a white jock. At loose ends and with few opportunities in his small Georgia hometown, he takes a job in Tallasee's photo studio. The old woman's need to know what has happened to her grandson stirs something in Charley. Perhaps it takes one lost soul to find another.
At once a heartwarming coming-of-age story, a murder mystery and a portrait of Southern small-town life in a turbulent era, “Blue Hole” is the compelling tale of the summer when Charley learned about death, life, love and the terrible secret that had shaped him in ways he'd never realized.