When they were boys, Ray Dawley, Eddie Sayers, and Matthew Kauffman were best friends. Then new kid Bobby âBonesâ Bonetti fell through the ice at Blackamore Pond. The other boys saved Bobby from drowning, but something else came out of the water that day, something dangerous that would tear their friendship apart and set one of them on a dark path.
Forty years after the incident on the ice, Ray, a retired college professor, has moved back into his childhood home. Eddie is a retired homicide detective, and Matthew is a successful investment banker. Bobby, a corrections officer at a juvenile detention center, has a secret: the darkness that found him under the ice when he was a kid has made him do terrible things.
Following a reunion at Rayâs house, Matthew is found murdered in his car beside the old pond. The killer includes a chilling message that only the three remaining friends would recognize. Could one of their own be a murderer?
A tense and disturbing thriller told from alternating perspectives of morally complex characters, All the Silent Bones, explores the lasting impact of childhood trauma and its influence on adult relationships.
When they were boys, Ray Dawley, Eddie Sayers, and Matthew Kauffman were best friends. Then new kid Bobby âBonesâ Bonetti fell through the ice at Blackamore Pond. The other boys saved Bobby from drowning, but something else came out of the water that day, something dangerous that would tear their friendship apart and set one of them on a dark path.
Forty years after the incident on the ice, Ray, a retired college professor, has moved back into his childhood home. Eddie is a retired homicide detective, and Matthew is a successful investment banker. Bobby, a corrections officer at a juvenile detention center, has a secret: the darkness that found him under the ice when he was a kid has made him do terrible things.
Following a reunion at Rayâs house, Matthew is found murdered in his car beside the old pond. The killer includes a chilling message that only the three remaining friends would recognize. Could one of their own be a murderer?
A tense and disturbing thriller told from alternating perspectives of morally complex characters, All the Silent Bones, explores the lasting impact of childhood trauma and its influence on adult relationships.
Jimmy Kauffmanâs funeral took place on a windy Sunday in December. The mercury in the old thermometer outside the church rectory touched thirty-two during the service that morning, but hours earlier, when Ronnie Matarese stumbled home and into his darkened kitchen, the weather app on his iPhone showed thirteen degrees.
Or eighteen. With the cocktail of Molly and Irish Car Bombs and a few other things pumping through his system, the sides of the three or the eight or whatever the hell it was wouldnât stop opening and closing. Ronnie stared at it blankly, his brain needing a couple of seconds to put together why he had checked his phone in the first place. Pure reflex. His apartment was freezing.
âThe fuck?â Ronnie flicked the wall switch beside the door, and the kitchen lights came on. He staggered over to the thermostat above the table. Forty-eight degrees. He leaned closer. The fire symbol for heat was missing at the top of the screen.
He turned back to the door, which was the only way in or out of his second-floor abode. No sign of forced entry, and his laptop still sat on the table where heâd left it.
Debbie. The bitch actually had the balls to turn off his heat, a parting gift after cleaning out her shit. Ronnieâs lips curled. He shouldâve taken back her keys. Fucking whore never stopped busting his balls. Not even on the day of her fatherâs funeral.
Ronnie slid the thermostat switch to Heat. The kitchen lights flickered, and the fire symbol started blinking. He tossed his phone and keys on the table, moved into his bedroom, and flicked on the wall switch. His TV was still on top of the dresser, but the window was open. Ronnie closed it. Fucking Debbie, all right. Nothing was missing, and the window was too high up for someone to use the trash cans. In the glow of the streetlight, Ronnie could see their dim shapes in the strip of darkness by the fence where he usually parked his Mustang. Good thing it was still in the shop. He would slit Debbieâs throat if she ever took a key to it.
Ronnie shivered, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and closed his eyes, grateful for the cold and the rush of adrenaline that had sobered him some. He felt sharper now. Still angry, yeah, but mellow too. He had his OGs to thank for thatâAngel, mainly, for scoring the Molly and keeping him straight when all the bullshit with Debbie had threatened to push him back on the pipe. Lucky bitch. Any other night, if sheâd pulled something like this, he would have gone after her. Not tonight, though. Nothing would bring him downânot even the cuntâs father, sixty years old and dead of acute alcohol poisoning. See you in hell, Jimmy Kauffman, you pickled old fuck.
Ronnie chuckled and began swaying as he hummed the chorus to âGangstaâs Paradise,â the song he and his OGs had closed down Paddyâs with. Yeah, still some anger in there with the mellow, but it was the kind of anger Ronnie liked, quiet and cool, the kind he could focus like a laserâlike when Debbieâs big mouth was just begging for a backhand. The last time had been one hundred percent her fault. Sheâd earned herself a black eye and a split lip. Even Angel agreed sheâd deserved it. Who the fuck did she think she was, shit-talking his mother? Especially while he was playing Call of Duty.
Ronnieâs stomach lurched, and his eyes widened. His PlayStation 5. If the bitch took itâŚ
He whirled for the door then staggered back a step when he saw a guy sitting in the chair near the closet.
Ronnie squinted and blinked as his brain tried to determine if it really was a guy or just a pile of clothes made to look like one, something Debbie had left to fuck with him. The guy didnât move, and he was bundled in black from head to toe with his face concealed almost entirely behind a pair of sunglasses and an old-fashioned hunterâs cap with earflaps. Then Ronnieâs eyes landed on a pistol with a big suppressor pointed directly at him, and he knew the guy was real.
âHi, Ronnie,â the man said.
Ronnieâs eyes darted toward the door.
âI wouldnât try it, but hey, thatâs me.â The man motioned toward the bed with the pistol.
Swallowing hard, Ronnie sat on the edge of the mattress and clutched the blanket with his right hand. âThe fuck is this? I ainât done nothing.â
âItâs not what youâve done but what you will do,â the man said. âSomething much worse than whacking around Jimmy Kauffmanâs daughter.â
Ronnie sat there with his face all scrunched and his brain telling him no fucking way. Debbieâs father was just some old union guy. He wasnât connected like Ronnie was. True, the Matarese family didnât have anywhere near the kind of muscle they did back in the day, but no one did, save for the DeLorenzos and the Boston crew. And Ronnie was in tight with them.
âYou donât remember me.â The man lowered his sunglasses to reveal his eyes.
Something ignited in Ronnieâs brain, a spark at the end of a fuse, snaking its way through all the booze and drug-addled slop and leading him back to his youth, to a pair of cold blue eyes behind the tiny square of security glass in his door at the Rhode Island Training Schoolâthe RITS, as everyone called it. He had done his one and only bid there at sixteen, six months for dealing Vicodin and possession of a stolen firearm. Not his first offense, judge threw the book at him, no connections saving his ass that time.
Ronnie had learned his lesson, though, or at least, how not to get caught. He never saw the inside of a prison cell again. But he still saw those blue eyes on the other side of the glass sometimes in his dreams. Eyes that had watched him like a hawk from the catwalk above the rec area. Eyes that had never shown a trace of fear, not even when their owner single-handedly broke up a fight between three guys, mowing them all down like a human machete.
Fuck. Machete. Yeah, that was his name. The guy in his bedroom was Bobby âthe Macheteâ Bonetti. He was a tenth-degree black belt or something. Ronnie and the other juvies used to call him Bruce Lee behind his back, but to his faceâŚ
âBossman?â The word passed Ronnieâs lips in a whisperâa fizz, not even a pop at the end of his fuse of recollection.
Bobby slid his glasses back up over his eyes. âWhen I was a kid,â he said, looking around, âI used to live in a place like this with my mother. Two bedrooms on the first floor of some triple-decker over in Silver Lake. Whole neighborhood has gone to shit now.â
Bobby turned back to Ronnie, who caught a glimpse of himself, just the smudgy gray outline of his head, reflected in his old correction officerâs sunglasses.
âShit,â Bobby said. âMy mother used to beat the shit out of me when I was a kid. Not literal shit, but something gets beat out of you just the same, right? Where does it all go, I wonder. Does it just evaporate? Or does it hang around and settle into things?â
Ronnieâs tongue felt stuck, but other fuses were being lit now in his brain, rapid-fire synapses sputtering to life and fizzing out again in muddy, dead-end answers to What the hell is he doing here? Never mind that he hadnât seen Bobby Bonetti in almost fifteen years; the son of a bitch was talking crazy. Ronnie wasnât too wasted to notice that.
âShe didnât always beat me, though, my mother. Sometimes, she did other things. Like this time when I was eight years old. It started with a dream I was having. I donât remember much else except for opening this cardboard box on my kitchen table. The inside was deep and lined with black stones fading down into a circle of darkness.â
Ronnieâs brain was fully awake now, all systems go with the singular purpose of talking his way out of this, whatever this was. It wasnât the first time heâd been in a situation where he had to diffuse a bomb before it went off, like when heâd still been dealing crystal on the side and one of his clients started tweaking.
âWhat are you doing here, Bossman?â Ronnie flashed a charming smile to accompany the forced sweetness in his voice, the same tone he used after his fights with Debbie, when they lay together in the dark and he called her honey and promised to never hit her again. Ronnieâs instinct was to try to pull the same shit on Bobby, but when his old corrections officer leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and both hands on the pistol, Ronnieâs throat closed so tight that he couldnât speak.
âIn the dream,â Bobby said, âI leaned into the darkness for a closer look, and this smell came back at me. Kind of like your smell, Ronnieâcigarette smoke, sweat, dogshit breath. Cherry Robitussin was mixed in there too. I gagged and tried to push the box away, but my arms wouldnât work right, then from out of the darkness at the bottom, there appeared this buzzing swarm of bees.â Bobby Bonetti sat back in his chair again, the pistol leveled and steady.
Ronnie swallowed. His throat felt like sandpaper, and his heart, lodged and pounding there, made it hard to breathe. But still, he did his best to keep his voice smooth. âLook, Mr. Bonetti. I donât know what you think Iââ
âNext thing I know, the bees are everywhere. I remember trying to scream but not being able to breathe, then this big bee lands on my head and stings me. Thatâs when I woke upâright when the bee stung me. The room was dark, and I was gasping for air. I just sort of, you know, threw my hands up to where the bee was but instead grabbed my motherâs wrist. She had me by the hair.â
So maybe this was about Debbie. Ronnie had yanked her around by her bleached-blond hair plenty of times during their five-year on-and-off relationship. What else could it be? Other than Debbieâs bullshit, he was doing well. He had just been promoted to shift supervisor down at the warehouse, and he never batted an eye when the DeLorenzos asked him to launder their stolen merch. Yeah, this had to be about Debbie.
âI hear what youâre saying.â Ronnie smoothed the blanket beside him. âIt ainât right the way I treated Debbie. And you have my word, BossâMr. BonettiâI swear, if I so much as lay a finger on that girlâs headââ
âSo I try to get my mother off me,â Bobby went on as if Ronnie hadnât spoken, âbut her grip was too strong, and she literally drags me out of bed by my hair. Had me all hunched over and scrambling for the door. My room was right off the kitchen like this one, and in no time, we were in the back hallway. My mother, she throws open the cellar door and snaps my head back, shoving me toward the top of the stairs. âDo you hear them?â she whispers in my ear. My scalp was on fire, and I was crying, but still, I managed to say, âYes.ââ
âMr. Bonetti, I get it. I swear Iââ
âYou see, Ronnie, my mother used to think there were elves living down there in our cellar. Elves. Why, I have no idea. Her mind was so fucked up sometimes. But the night Iâm telling you about, she tells me only love can make them go away then asks me if I love her. I didnât reply fast enough, so she snaps back my head. At the same time, I brace myself against the doorframe, my toes curling over the top step. I beg her not to throw me down the stairs. âDo you love me?â she asks again, twisting my hair, and I tell her I do.â
Ronnie Matarese felt a darkness descend upon him, even as he understood that it had always been there, pouring out from those eyes behind the sunglasses and into his apartment. A darkness as indifferent and as cold as the one that had greeted him when heâd returned home. A darkness that feared no light and could not be reasoned with. A darkness that was neither happy nor sad but just was.
Bobby the Machete Bonetti had not visited Ronnie to warn him or give him a beating. He had come to kill him. Ronnie suddenly knew this as surely as he was sitting there, and he was both terrified and furious that he hadnât realized it sooner, when he still might have had a chance to escape. More than anything, though, Ronnie was sad. He wasnât ready to dieâhe wasnât even thirtyâbut there was no turning back from the elves at the bottom of these stairs. That was what this crazy SOB was trying to tell him.
Ronnie began to cry, softly at first then harder as Bobby finished his story.
âSo my mother, she lets me go, but I just held on to the doorframe and didnât dare look back. She was still there; I could hear her breathing. And in my mind, I watched her, mouth open and eyes blinking as she looked around like she usually did when she came out of one of her episodes. A minute later, I hear the sofa springs in the parlor. Sheâd been sleeping in there for weeks because the elves hid under her bed, she sometimes thought. But still, I didnât move. I just stood there, staring down at the darkness in silence.â
Ronnie searched Bobby Bonettiâs sunglasses but saw only murder in the smudge of his reflection, light and shadows on a face that looked like a skull. This was not the way he was supposed go out, sniveling on his bed like a pussy and not knowing why. And that was the hardest part. Not knowing why. Not knowing what he had doneâno, not had done but would do. And just as quickly as the darkness had descended, Ronnie saw a light. It was faint at first but coming fast, like when he was speeding through the cross-harbor tunnel up in Boston.
âYou said you were here because of something I would do,â Ronnie said, making no attempt to hide the desperate, trembling hope in his voice. âNot because of something I did but because of something I would do. Thatâs what you said, right? What is it? Tell me what you think Iâm gonna do, and I swear on the souls of my dead parents that I wonât do it. Please, Iâm begging you, Mr. Bonetti. You have my word.â
âI would give anything to have that kind of silence again,â Bobby said. âA silence so precious that, when itâs broken, it stings you like a box of bees.â
Then Bobby shot him.
All the Silent Bones is a gripping, atmospheric thriller that weaves childhood trauma, buried secrets, and supernatural dread into a haunting narrative about the weight of memory and the fragility of friendship. Set in a quiet town haunted by a long-ago tragedy, the story centers on four former friendsâRay, Eddie, Matthew, and Bobbyâwhose lives were forever changed when Bobby fell through the ice at Blackamore Pond as a boy. Though the others saved him, something else came out of the water that dayâsomething dark, and it's been following them ever since.
Now, forty years later, Matthew is dead, found near the same pond with a cryptic message meant only for the remaining three. Ray, a retired professor, and Eddie, a former homicide detective, reunite to uncover the truth. Meanwhile, Bobbyânow a corrections officerâharbors a horrifying secret. The story shifts fluidly between past and present, unraveling how a single moment of fear and confusion spiraled into decades of guilt, distance, and darkness.
What makes this story shine is its emotional depth and elegant prose. The characters are flawed and deeply human, shaped by their choices and haunted by their regrets. The writing captures both the nostalgia of youth and the quiet, creeping dread of adulthood unraveling. The mystery builds slowly but deliberately, with a satisfying blend of realism and eerie tension that keeps the pages turning. It lingers with you, like a shadow under the ice.
That said, the pacing drags slightly in the middle, and while the supernatural elements are intriguing, they remain somewhat vague by the end. A bit more clarity around the âdarknessâ that attached itself to Bobby might have provided a stronger payoff. Still, the emotional resonance of the story more than makes up for it.
Perfect for fans of Stephen Kingâs It and C.J. Tudorâs The Chalk Man, All the Silent Bones is a thoughtful, chilling, and quietly devastating exploration of how the past never really lets go.