Sin of Omission — David Katz

On a hot summer night in 1962, Danny Cogan and his best friend, Matt Lasker, watch as two of their friends engage in a brutal fight that leaves one of them dead and his body unrecognizable. The police believe that the murderer is the victim, and Danny and Matt, the only witnesses to the crime, hide the truth to protect the real killer. They keep their awful secret, but doing so splits their friendship apart.

Forty years later, Danny lives "a hundred miles and a universe away" from the neighborhood where he grew up. All is well in his comfortable suburban life until, unexpectedly, his sister telephones to tell him that she has seen the supposedly dead boy, now a sinister adult, in a Boston restaurant. In his struggle to deal with the truth after so many years, Danny remembers growing up in Suffolk Square, an immigrant neighborhood outside of Boston, and some of the relatives and friends whose own experiences affected his life. As he relives the events leading up to the murder and its terrible aftermath, he comes to understand the consequences of his having failed to speak up so many years ago.

Sin of Omission paints a picture of an ethnic neighborhood in the early sixties, describing how its inhabitants' simmering prejudices have traveled from the old country and re-emerged through three generations of its Russian Orthodox and Russian Jewish population.