Author: Peter Blauner
Coney Island is a weird place, packed with people from every walk of life, and David Fitzgerald fits in well. An English professor at a tough public school, he works hard to connect with students with whom he has little in common. Sometimes he succeeds; sometimes he fails. But one of his failures is about to become a catastrophe. A former student of David’s, Nasser Hamdy, has fallen in with a group of Islamic extremists who practice a cheap kind of jihad, mugging and robbing in the name of their holy war.