This edition includes a signed bookplate.

The Shards recounts developments during Ellis' time at prep school.

Los Angeles, 1981 - 17-year-old Bret is a senior at the Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends, even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equalled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them with threats and acts of violence.

Can he trust his friends - or his own mind - to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, Bret spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles toward a collision.

The Shards is a fusing of fact and fiction that explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17 - sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage.