A young gay man in 1960s Chicago is wrongfully accused of murder in Fritsch’s novel.

Twenty-something bank accountant Ted Linden comes home to a shock—his live-in boyfriend’s dead body. Someone has slashed 19-year-old Warren Hadley’s throat in their backyard garden. Ted wastes no time in pointing the finger at Darrel, Warren’s virulently homophobic older brother. As if losing his beloved partner weren’t enough, Ted suffers backlash following media coverage of the killing. Some of this is sadly unsurprising, such as his boss’s pique following Ted’s frank statements to reporters regarding his gay relationship. But he’s blindsided when he’s accused of Warren’s murder. Ted has little doubt that the real culprit is Darrel, but until the police can prove that, he must prepare to defend himself in the event he is indicted. And if Darrel is truly innocent as he claims, will it be up to Ted to find the murderer? The author’s quiet story is only nominally a mystery; things simply come to light, as neither Ted nor the amiable investigating local detective, Tim Conway, dig up any clues. There’s sharp, abundant social commentary taking aim at the Vietnam War and racism, among other topics (Warren, speaking of Darrel, suggests, “He should tell the draft board he’s homosexual. You know, he likes other men. After he does that, they won’t let him near the straight guys they’re sending to die in Viet Nam for no good reason at all”). The author develops the relatively small cast well; Ted and Warren, for example, have drastically different experiences coming out to their respective families. Unfortunately, readers barely get a glimpse of the couple’s 14-month romance before its tragic ending. Moreover, Ted’s passionless first-person narration fails to illustrate the dismay he must surely feel. While some readers will guess the ending, it still packs a punch as it reckons with the aftermath of such events for an openly gay man in the mid-20th century.

Keen characterization drives a somewhat cold but thought-provoking crime tale.

Fritsch’s unique twist on ancient Greece and early Rome offers more adventures of Timon, last surviving member of Troy’s royal family, and his companion, Lukas.

In Fritsch’s version of the Greek myth, Timon is son of Helen, the Spartan beauty, and Paris, the Trojan prince who brought her to Troy, which precipitated the Trojan War. After Paris was killed and Troy destroyed, Helen married Menelaus. They’ve reigned as king and queen of Sparta for the past 17 years. When they brought baby Timon to Sparta, they placed him in an orphanage to ensure his safety. He grew up with Lukas, his best friend, lover, and musical soul mate. Timon has only recently learned of his royal lineage. Now he and Lukas live together in the palace. Meanwhile, trouble is brewing in the fledging republic of Rome, populated two decades earlier by Trojan escapees. Former Trojan landowner Coriolanus, now commander of the Roman army and navy, sends his 18-year-old son, Marco, to Sparta to invite Timon, whose existence has recently become public, for a visit. In Rome, the three young men establish a ménage à trois, and Fritsch devotes considerable narrative space to their carefree, libidinous romps. Unfortunately, their frolicking, less poignant than the earlier novel’s Timon-Lukas love story, threatens to overwhelm the novel’s more intriguing underpinnings, which deal with political avarice and gender equality, the latter represented by the story’s strongest female character, Thalia, captain of her own merchant ship. Gradually, Timon realizes Coriolanus’ invitation was part of a plan to replace the republic with a monarchy. He intends to seize power during the upcoming senate elections, in which the “plebeians,” who now have the right to vote, have forced the patricians to run against Brutus, the populist hero. Readers will recognize Coriolanus’ scheme to overthrow the popular vote by violence as a haunting reminder of America’s current political climate and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Following the structure of his series opener, Fritsch hands over alternating narration to the three primary characters—Timon, Lukas, and Marco, giving the novel three distinct, engaging voices, although only Marco faces emotionally compelling conflict.

An enjoyable escape read, sometimes undermined by frivolous scenes, with contemporary relevance and likable leads.

A novel offers a revisionist version of the Trojan War alternatingly narrated by Helen and a teenager in the Sparta orphanage that the beautiful woman supports.

Almost all of the characters, conveniently identified upfront, in Fritsch’s novel can be found in Homer’s The Iliad, but this is not an adventurous war tale extolling the glory of great warriors. And whereas in the traditional story the jealousies and pettiness of the Greek gods and goddesses played key roles in fomenting the war between the Greek kingdoms and the walled city of Troy, they are virtually absent in this narrative. It is human avarice, blood lust, arrogance—and love—that propel Fritsch’s anti-war story. Timon, a 17-year-old orphan, introduces himself to readers and begins the narration. It is 18 years after Helen (“the face that launched a thousand ships”), on what was to be the day of her marriage to King Menelaus, sailed away from Sparta with the Trojan Prince Paris, precipitating the 10-year sacking of Troy. Most of the children in the Sparta orphanage lost their parents in that war. Only Timon is of totally unknown parentage. As a young child, he bonded with Lukas, another orphan his age: The two were “always side by side like a pair of young oxen.” Now, they are lovers and musical soul mates, committed to spending their lives together. Singers and eventually composers, they write ballads mourning the tragic aftermath of an unnecessary war. Their love story offers the most joyous, tender, and poignant sections of the tale. Fritsch quickly sets up the back-and-forth narrative pattern for the imaginative novel, immediately leaping 18 years into the past and handing narration over to Helen. She has just arrived in Troy with Paris and asserts that she does not want to be returned to Greece. Helen is convinced that the Greek kings would never be so foolhardy as to start a war over her. Readers witness the battles through the eyes of this young woman who has allegiances to both sides but is determined to help the Trojans defend their city. Late in the tale, the author offers readers a surprise. Proficient, modern prose and dialogue, enhanced by lifestyle details, make an ancient epic especially accessible.

An enjoyable, inventive Trojan War tale with an intriguing final twist and a serious message.

Ophelia offers the true story behind what caused things to turn rotten in the state of Denmark in this postmodern take on Hamlet.

Fritsch’s (Cordelia Lionheart, 2018, etc.) work opens with an event labeled The Visit, which turns out to be King Fortinbras’ meeting with Ophelia, who had long been believed to be dead, at her cottage. Over the course of their conversation, which moves back and forth through time to follow the primary characters of Shakespeare’s play—Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, Polonius, Horatio, and Ophelia herself, the eponymous daughter—the duplicitous nature of court life under the senior Hamlet and then Claudius is laid out. While Denmark starts a calamitous war with Norway, which is how Fortinbras enters the story, Ophelia and Horatio take note of the castle’s intrigues, discovering many secrets along the way and putting their free time to good use. It isn’t necessary to be familiar with Hamlet to enjoy Fritsch’s tale, but readers who know the Bard’s work will have a greater appreciation for the changes. Rather than a pitiable character driven mad by unrealized longing, this Ophelia is a strong, intelligent force who moves to improve her fate, as befitting the title character of the narrative. Purists may view these characterizations with distaste—no royal except for Fortinbras is portrayed in any way close to positively, for example, although Gertrude is given more agency here than in the play—but Fritsch deploys his changes with a sure hand, setting their behavior in a context that makes sense for the time. The narrative’s structure precludes suspense, but the story unfolds in a clear, straightforward fashion, with a solid grasp of where all the plot pieces are at any time. Much of the dialogue is rendered in an anachronistic fashion, with profanity that reads more 21st century than the period when the original play was written, which will occasionally jar readers. But the language gives the characters an immediacy and relatability that more classical portrayals sometimes lack and largely fits into the author’s feminist revamping.

Despite anachronistic language, this inventive retelling of Hamlet resonates through clear plotting and strong characterization.

A righteous daughter reclaims her father’s kingdom in this rendition of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Cordelia, 16-year-old daughter of Britain’s King Lear, opens this debut novel by vigorously applying her knee to the groin of Mundred, bastard son of the earl of Gloucester and would-be rapist, the first of her many attacks on toxic masculinity. She’s the innocent eye of a hurricane of ambition and treachery. Her elder sisters, Regan and Goneril, hatch rival plans to maneuver their respective husbands, the dukes of Cornwall and Albany, into seizing the throne. Both women also take the loathsome Mundred as a lover. Mundred orchestrates his own rise to power by murdering Gloucester, Cornwall, and Albany and raising a revolt against Lear, who placates him by naming Cordelia heir to the throne and promising him her hand. Alarmed at Mundred’s machinations, Cordelia vents increasingly strident indignation at Lear’s dithering refusal to punish him, and their relationship gets really nasty. (Father: “You’re a whore. And so was your mother.” Daughter: “I should hope my mother was a whore. I should hope she enjoyed making you a cuckold.”) Lear duly disinherits Cordelia and abdicates his crown to Regan and Goneril, which precipitates more bloodshed and war—and here the tale veers from dynastic melodrama into populist crusade. Cordelia, accompanied by Mundred’s sexy but passive half brother, Garred, goes to live among the peasantry and launches a class struggle—“The lives and happiness of working people depend upon their being secure in the ownership of the property they’ve accumulated through their labor,” she declaims—against aristocratic privilege. Fritsch’s ambitious version of the Lear saga has a raucous feminist energy to it, especially as the brash Cordelia develops a zest for slitting the throats of male miscreants. Unfortunately, the characters feel like cardboard—Regan and Goneril are cartoonishly bitchy; Mundred is a transparent psychopath; and Lear is simply a dunce for not heeding everyone’s advice to hang the monstrous villain—and the dialogue is not exactly poetic (“I wish to tell every other person in this kingdom what they may and may not do,” chortles Goneril). Readers who love the original may want to stick with it.

A boisterous retread of the Bard’s classic, minus the elegant writing and psychological complexity.

Fritsch (Elizabeth Daleiden on Trial, 2016, etc.) unfurls a tortured familial epic set in an Illinois farming community.

Henry, the titular grandfather and patriarch of the Reinhart family, has a long, infamous history in the rural farming community where his father settled in the previous century. Henry’s brazen, lifelong ambition to take over every farm on the section of land where he was born, and to “never again have to share a fence with another human being,” makes members of the community—and his own family—suspect him of many crimes, including the murder of his own brother. His steadfast refusal to attend the local church and his continued acquisition of his neighbors’ farms by various, sometimes-dubious means doesn’t help his case. By the time he comes to care for his only grandson, Kurt Reinhart, in one of the houses on his land in 1947, he and his clan are seen as pariahs. Kurt lives and works alongside his stubborn but surprisingly open-minded grandfather; later, he investigates the violent rumors about his birthright while also coming to terms with his own homosexuality and the sexual repression in his family. Fritsch will still maintain readers’ interest with his sheer storytelling verve, as he brings vivid specificity to his fully imagined world. His folksy, easygoing style belies the painful secrets and violence at the heart of the novel and renders the bloodstained and tragic narrative much lighter and easier to read than it has any right to be. However, the ambitious tale occasionally gets muddled amid the minutiae of Reinhart family’s history and an exhausting cavalcade of thinly drawn secondary characters. The dialogue is also often tin-eared and exposition-heavy, and none of the characters speaks in a way that’s dissimilar to the narrator.

A confident, if occasionally exhausting, familial and historical epic, coupled with a tender bildungsroman.

Fritsch’s (Promised Valley Peace, 2013, etc.) historical legal drama reveals the seamy underbelly of a small Illinois farming community.

Jonah Neumeyer, a young gay lawyer living in Chicago in 1977, was 6 years old in 1955 when he witnessed a traumatic house fire in Revere, Illinois, that apparently killed two elderly men. He’s remembered a comment from one of the onlookers ever since, as the charred bodies were brought out by the firemen: “Those two old queers got what they deserved.” Now Jonah has returned to his hometown to find out if that fire was set intentionally. The first step is to speak with the recently widowed Elizabeth Daleiden, who lived in the neighboring house—and who inherited the men’s farm after their deaths. Jonah believes that Elizabeth is hiding something, but he doesn’t anticipate that their conversation will get back to Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, Olivia Daleiden, a nasty, vengeful woman who accuses her of murdering not only the two men, but also Elizabeth’s father in 1950. Somewhat improbably, the Concord County state’s attorney, Tanner Howland, smells the potential for a big-trial victory that will propel his political ambitions; he successfully obtains indictments, and the stage is set for Elizabeth’s takedown. As the unorthodox trial proceeds—with witnesses allowed to expound endlessly without objection—it reveals a veritable Peyton Place of back stories, in which everyone in Revere seems to have connections with everyone else. Fritsch saddles himself with an ambitious task by jumping into the well-trod territory of courtroom dramas. However, the trial is only a vehicle for his examination of small-town prejudices, especially regarding gays and lesbians. He kindly provides a list of characters upfront so readers can keep track of them all, and some of the walk-on players are engaging. That said, most of the real character development is limited to Jonah and Elizabeth; the rest of the players are mostly just divided into good guys or bad. Still, the action moves quickly, and there are enough surprises to keep readers hooked to the end.

Big-city life has nothing on small-town shenanigans in this often enjoyable read with a serious message.

In this fourth and final novel in Fritsch’s (Promised Valley Conspiracy, 2012, etc.) series, a sweeping new kind of warfare threatens an ancient valley and its peoples.

The valley’s rich farmland has for generations been a zone of contention between the farmers of the valley and the hunters of the less-inviting surrounding hills. Each side draws on a long tradition of beliefs assuring them that the gods intended the valley for their people and no others. Through three novels full of tension, betrayal and catastrophic warfare, the farmers and hunters have tried exchanging high-ranking hostages with each other in hopes of ensuring good behavior on both sides. One such move sends handsome, heroic Blue Sky to live among the hill people and eventually fall in love with one of them, a man named Wandering Star. The novel convincingly depicts a society in which homosexual relationships are conducted openly with no lessening of public esteem, and Fritsch handles the theme with a no-fuss skill reminiscent of Mary Renault’s. Another narrative thread follows the sarcastic agnosticism of the younger Promised Valley generation, which may be a satisfying innovation for 21st-century readers. Blue Sky, Wandering Star, and their various allies and enemies also contend with the introduction of horses as beasts of war in the valley’s latest conflagration. Fritsch tells a very detailed, very human story, although the opening 10 pages, a stultifying, bullet-point plot summary of the previous books in the series, may alienate new readers. Some of the book’s younger characters admirably seek to forge a real, lasting peace in their lifetimes, and the interminable threat of war allows Fritsch to make the conflict an allegory for every human conflict to come. There’s a sad moment of irony when a character late in the book hopes that their peoples will “never go to war again.”

A wise, bittersweet conclusion to a sprawling tale of prehistoric war and peace.

The multipart saga set in a lush prehistoric valley continues.

The third volume in Fritsch’s Promised Valley series (Promised Valley War, 2012) explores the ongoing conflict between the valley people, who are prosperous farmers occupying all the richest Promised Valley lands, and the hill people, who inhabit the sparser uplands and live bitterly, believing that their gods promised the valley and its comforts to them. Since the valley people have a similar belief about themselves, a state of dangerous friction exists between the two groups. Savage warfare and desperate diplomacy marked the well-orchestrated events of the first two books, and tensions continue to boil to the surface in this volume. Blue Sky, a stalwart valley person (and one of the most memorable characters of the entire series) says at one point, “Fighting in a war is the most disgusting thing a person can do. People in their right mind can’t do it.” Nevertheless, plenty of such fighting threatens the fragile peace in this latest volume, in which the enemies trade numerous hostages in an effort by both sides to stop the cycle of distrust and bloodshed. And although there’s war, there’s also tolerance: As with the previous two books, the author presents us with a prehistoric society that places no stigma on being gay—key male characters have not only wives or intended wives but male lovers as well. The author attempts to make the various plotlines accessible to new readers, but the books lose some dramatic heft if not read in order. Still, the narrative impact is vividly realized in any case: These books continue to be an intelligent and involving look at the personal sacrifices of making war and keeping peace.

Another well-done excursion into Jean Auel territory.

War erupts in a peaceful prehistoric valley.

  Tensions were already brewing in Fritsch's Promised Valley Rebellion (2010), in which a group of young people living in the relatively benign and loosely organized prehistoric community of Promised Valley rebelled against their king and his council in reaction to a seemingly arbitrary, tyrannical ruling the king had made. That rebellion revolved around the hidden past of Rose Leaf, the beautiful young daughter of war-hero farmer Green Field, and it led to war with the hill people whose marauding ways are a constant threat to the inhabitants of Promised Valley. In Fritsch's latest novel (which is given depth by a reading of the first book but can be enjoyed as a stand-alone book), despite the best efforts of that same group of young people, war between the valley people and the hill people has erupted again. The author’s well-rendered descriptions of the creeping onslaught of war and winter give the reader a visceral feel for the endangered paradise that can occur despite the best intentions of the best people, and readers will be surprised by the twists he gives his tale. Alongside the careful plotting and natural-sounding dialogue, there's a refreshing amount of deeper resonances in the Promised Valley series, a steady undercurrent of commentary of the present day. The treatment of the young hero Blue Sky's attraction to other men, for instance, is straightforward but nonconfrontational, and characters at several points grapple with their society's primitive theology. “Could gods who were good-hearted … allow humans to go to war with one another?” the narrative at one point asks. “[I]f they, like humans, had no choice in the matter, why did humans call them gods?” The novel will leave readers eager to find out what happens next in Promised Valley. Luckily, Fritsch has plans to add two more volumes to the series.  

A captivating novel that will transport readers back to prehistory times—while reminding them of their own.

Fritsch’s debut novel is a Paleolithic adventure in the manner of Jean Auel.

The story is very likely as old as human civilization: a younger generation comes of age, feels frustrated by its elders and rebels, bringing conflict, debate and even violence. The author gives readers little in the way of precise historical details about Promised Valley and its people: there are farmers, city dwellers and a court ruled by a royal family and run by bureaucratic tellers, but the events could be taking place almost anywhere in the world, in virtually any of the first few million years that followed the opening of the Pleistocene. This narrative imprecision is part of the point: when Tall Oak, the king, forbids his heir Morning Sun to marry the daughter of a farmer—and when this decision brings division and violence to his kingdom—the story encourages the reader to ponder the universal elements of the tale (the character names encourage the same thing, although after 100 pages of Spring Rain, Green Field and Noon Breeze, readers may want a quick-reference character list, which the book sadly lacks). In other hands, this could result in some quite dreary reading, but Fritsch again and again saves his parable by granting his characters an easy, unforced humanity that is instantly inviting. His people may have generic names, but they sound like individuals, and that makes all the difference. At one point, Blue Sky talks about how lucky two of his friends are not to be royalty: “Anybody who isn’t the prince should be glad he isn’t,” he says. “Someday Morning Sun will have to order people killed. Valley Defender and Solemn Promise won’t. We won’t.” Moments like that are plentiful, and they make the story memorable.

A strange, primitive world that feels winningly real.