An abandoned girl, a savaged heart, a fatal hit and run―the thirteen stories in this powerful collection explore the scattered wreckage of life’s survivors. The characters in Girls in Trouble struggle to overcome loss and find their way through a world of desire and menace, redemption and error. Normalcy, a state always just beyond reach, glitters and beckons, impelling them forward. A relationship disintegrates while a pot of crabs boils. A man vows to end his destructive lifestyle before it ruins his family and future. A young woman fights to free herself from the weight of an unwanted inheritance. A girl finds herself lost in the storm of her parent’s break up. These stories crackle and sing with an urgency and longing that lingers long after the last page is read.

There are seven defining moments in a person’s life. For Morris Bliss, the difficulty is in knowing which moments are defining.

At age thirty-five, Morris Bliss is clamped in the jaws of New York City inertia – he wants to travel but has no money; he needs a job but has no prospects; he still shares a walk-up apartment with his father.

Enter Stefani, an eighteen-year-old girl in a Catholic school uniform, and Morris’s once static life quickly unravels when Stefani’s father, oblivious to his daughter’s actions, calls on Morris to work for him. Morris’s life becomes further entangled when his best friend, N.J., is recruited by an international cartel that controls global economics and local sex markets, and Morris is called in to save N.J.’s bacon. But most importantly, Morris’s father, a taciturn widower, finally reveals the truth surrounding the strange death of Morris’s mother.

A body at rest will remain at rest. Unless acted upon. With the agony of his inertia finally broken, Morris Bliss fights to keep his life from careening out of control. He must learn to adapt if he is to survive.