September 1, 2024
Boyle (Shoot the Moonlight Out) is known for his award-nominated, character-driven crime fiction with a literary bent. Here he offers a thriller that begins in 1986 Gravesend, Brooklyn, where an angry Risa Franzone accidentally kills her drunk husband. She enlists her sister and a friend to hide the crime, but eventually cracks in their cover-up begin to appear. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from January 1, 2025
Smacking her abusive, low-life husband in the head with a cast-iron pan, a young Brooklyn mom sets off a chain of events that threatens her and her family, including her young son. Risa Taverna is the essence of well-behaved ("she's lived all tightened up"). But when her drunk husband, Sav, points a gun at her; her 8-month-old son, Fab; and her close sister, Giulia, she takes action. Tragically, Sav hits his head on a table on the way down and dies. With the help of Fab's "Uncle Chooch," who has long pined after Risa, the desperate sisters bury the body in upstate New York and tell everyone in their Italian neighborhood of Gravesend that Sav ran off to parts unknown. Everyone except Fab, who barely speaks, manages to lead a normal-ish life until years later when Sav's wretched older brother, Roberto, shows up questioning Risa's story (he will regret doing so). Years later, Father Tim, a young priest with money problems, tries to extort money from Risa to keep him from spreading rumors about Sav that he heard in a bar. And in the final section of this flowing epic, Fab, now an angry, delinquent teenager with gambling debts, goes off in search of the father he barely knew but is fast turning into. An established noir master, Boyle outdoes himself in crafting a novel of deep dimensions marked by intergenerational trauma, family strife, and failed religion ("the cardboard taste of a million communion wafers remained in his mouth"). It's a page-turning performance with unforgettable scenes, including a nearly unbearable one in which Risa can't help serving the blackmailing priest warmed up lasagna even as he's threatening her. The names of the characters, including Jane the Stain, All Bad Allie, and Cyclone Archie, are worth the price of admission. A great, gravely unsettling novel that welcomes repeated readings.
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Starred review from December 9, 2024
Boyle (Shoot the Moonlight Out) delivers his most ambitious novel yet with this extraordinary crime saga set in the working-class neighborhood of Gravesend, Brooklyn. The story opens in 1986, with 28-year-old Risa realizing she’s made a tragic mistake by marrying Saverio “Sav” Franzone. Sav’s escalating violence comes to a head the night he drunkenly pulls a gun on Risa and the couple’s eight-month old son. When Sav threatens Risa’s sister later that night, Risa reflexively grabs a metal pan and hits him with it, killing him. The sisters panic and turn for help to their neighbor, Christopher “Chooch” Gardini, a childhood friend of Sav’s who harbors secret feelings for Risa. Chooch comes up with a plan to bury the body on his family’s land upstate, and over the next two decades, it appears the cover-up has worked: most neighbors are satisfied with the story that Sav ran off and abandoned his family, but doubts persist, especially among the regulars of the local dive bar. As Risa and Sav’s son grows up and begins to follow in his father’s criminal footsteps, he becomes increasingly obsessed with learning more about the night Sav died. Boyle structures the sprawling tale like a Greek tragedy, mining potent themes of legacy and class with such force and empathy that readers may come to think of him as the Balzac of Brooklyn. It’s a stunning achievement. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Assoc.
January 1, 2025
Like Armistead Maupin and San Francisco, Greg Iles and Natchez, or Dennis Lehane and Boston, William Boyle's voice is the voice of Brooklyn. In his crime novels set in the New York City borough, he uses local dialect and idioms for flavor; his characters are people who, we feel, could exist only in Brooklyn; and even the stories feel tied to the place, as though they are products of the people and streets. In his newest novel, set in the mid-1980s in the bayside neighborhood of Gravesend, Boyle tells the story of a woman who murders her husband in a fit of rage. Over the course of two decades, the memory of what happened haunts her and sets the course her life. It is a beautifully crafted, perfectly told story, featuring people who feel so real that, when the book is finished, we miss them and the colorful, memorable place in which they live.
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