In this captivating story set in 1945 rural Virginia, Robbie Bliss has gone off to war, never to return. His family is reeling from the loss and so is his best friend, Jay Preston, who did return home, but with a serious leg injury. Jay has befriended Robbie’s little sister Ceola, and the two spend time poring over the detective stories and penny rags that Robbie loved.

One day, Jay tells Ceola and Bunny Prescott—a young woman in love with Jay—that he found a dead body in the woods. He took a picture of the body, but he was frightened that the killer might still be there, so he ran. The three head back, but find no body, only a pair of high heels with blood on them. Ceola believes Jay wholeheartedly, but Bunny is skeptical and presses him for answers. Jay admits that the body is that of Lily Vellum, a girl he was supposed to meet in the woods for a photography session and who was reported missing from her nearby mountain town.

The three start looking into Lily’s disappearance and murder, but Bunny suspects there is something wrong with Jay’s story and can’t understand his obsession with the girl—or why Jay doesn’t seem to be attracted to her.

But Jay and Robbie were both hiding secrets—secrets contained in the journal Robbie left behind. And when those secrets come to light, they lead everyone down a path to tragedy.

Told alternately from Ceola’s and Bunny’s viewpoints, and interspersed with a pulp story written by Robbie and published anonymously, Dodging and Burning is a tragic and sensitive, but beautifully told story. Ceola’s perspective gives us the story of a preteen girl coming of age as her family grieves the loss of their son, even while remaining unable to accept him for who he was. And Bunny’s perspective offers a look at a young woman grappling with unrequited love when she realizes the man she loves is gay and her eyes are opened to newly seeing people she has been raised to believe are “deviants.”

The mystery seems less important to any of the three main characters than their relationships with one another. Their friendship seems to give each of them something—a sense of importance, a feeling of belonging, a chance to be close to someone in the face of shared loss. John Copenhaver beautifully addresses the difficulties faced by two gay men in this time period, and the dangers of such a love, a story that will break readers’ hearts.