A TALE OF PRIMA FACIE

In Rose’s mystery, a 40-year-old Chicago cop investigates a murder with few leads while wrestling with her own troubled youth—and the lies she’s told about it.

Mila Taylor didn’t grow up wanting to be a detective, but her tortured early years pushed her in that direction. After her mother died of cancer, she was raised by an “uninvested father” who was seemingly incapable of holding down a job. Her only solace was her relationship with her older sister, Farah, but one night in 1996, during a tempestuous dispute, Mila’s father murdered her sibling—a crime that Mila witnessed when she was only 12. The father is acquitted by reason of insanity and sent to a psychiatric ward. Profoundly burdened by the grim loss as an adult, Mila throws herself into her work, and in 2024, she begins working on a new case: the killing of Sullivan Maxwell, the introverted owner of a dual cafe and bookstore on the Near West Side. There’s scant evidence pointing to a culprit, but Mila discovers that Sullivan’s business partner and best friend, Davis Parks, wanted to sell the shop against Sullivan’s wishes. In Rose’s grippingly suspenseful crime drama, Mila attempts to track down the deceased’s mysterious girlfriend, Natalia, and unravel Davis’ lies—but her own deeply guarded secrets begin to reveal themselves, as well, which complicates her life further. The author’s delicate restraint is remarkable, as only slowly and gradually does a fully coherent story emerge—a crystallization of a narrative fog that readers will find riveting. Rose raises provocative questions about the nature of mental disorders and the extent to which they’re genetic inheritances or the consequences of lived trauma; indeed, Mila poignantly struggles with these issues herself: “I’m a heartless monster. Incapable of attachment. Just like my dad.” Overall, this is a psychologically searching drama that’s far more about the frailty of the human mind than a murder investigation, and it’s composed with captivating subtlety.

A mesmerizing whodunit that astutely explores the legacy of mental illness.