A budding journalist and a housing advocate join forces to investigate a series of crimes spurred by an act of vandalism at the Boston Holocaust Memorial.

On the eve of the "Summer of Hate," Mark Bergman, a young struggling Bar Mitzvah photographer trying to break into serious journalism, meets fellow tenant Annie Holt, a Catholic housing activist. The same night, across town, someone vandalizes the Boston Holocaust Memorial, which at first appears to be an isolated event, but when Mark joins Annie at an eviction protest across town, they soon discover it was a part of a more sinister and coordinated series of attacks. From the Vilna Shul in Beacon Hill down to South Carolina low country, Mark and Annie's relationship deepens as they hunt the perpetrators and ultimately reach a point, both with each other and the crimes they're investigating, where they must make the most difficult decisions they ever faced. Told from alternating points of view, Last People follows both Mark and Annie and a series of humorous minor characters, all of whom are searching for identity and a place in a fractured, volatile, and dangerous America. Part love story, part mystery, part coming of age, Last People is a novel about homelessness--literally, metaphorically--and the ways in which people grasp onto labels in order to find meaning and purpose in their lives even when those labels fail to adequately define them.