Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder

It can't have been easy growing up the daughter of a cocaine addict who was executed in a sordid hit sanctioned by the Rhode Island mob in 1984. Carroll's memoir reveals the scarring effect of losing her mother, a petite Jewish woman who loved her child, photography, dogs, and drugs. The motherless four-year-old grew into a writer who pursued the truth about the murder, which was sloppily prosecuted by a system more interested in evidence of organized crime than justice. Carroll combines information she learned from police, court, and medical examiner records with anecdotes and family revelations about Joan Carroll. Carroll's father had issues of his own, namely his struggles with alcohol. Kevin Carroll was a trusted and charismatic longtime employee of the Providence Journal, but Leah, world-weary and skeptical by the age of 18, wasn't shocked when her father was found dead in a flophouse. Carroll's clear writing is authentic, but her tale is not as arresting as other memoirs of growing up victimized, such as Cylin and John Busby's The Year We Disappeared or Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle. Still, this one will find an audience among young adults.