Sometime in the late 1950s, on the steps of an unknown church, somebody takes a black and white photograph of an assembly of boys making their first communions. Above the heads of eight of the boys, who are all fated to die within the next twenty years, are small carefully ascribed Xs. When the picture is found more than fifty years years later in an abandoned steamer trunk purchased at a neighborhood auction, the pursuit for an answer to the mystery of those marks begins. The First Communion Murders is the story of that search.