A compelling portrait of crime and justice.
Springer’s historical novel follows the decades-long investigation of the murder of three boys.
When three boys, Ricky Henderson and brothers Mikey and Joey Schuler, vanish in 1950s Chicago and are later found dead in a nearby forest preserve, the city is thrown into a state of panic. A massive manhunt ensues, drawing in police from multiple jurisdictions. Despite sweeping up dozens of known pedophiles and other potential suspects, authorities fail to find the killer. The investigation is hampered by chaos at the crime scene, jurisdictional conflicts, and a flood of false leads, and the murders go unsolved for decades. Almost 40 years later, ATF investigator Nick Ferraro, who had known the victims as a child, stumbles upon an unexpected lead—a long-buried confession overheard by a criminal informant (“He told me he killed a couple of kids one time”). Teaming up with police officer A.J. Reid, the daughter of one of the original investigating officers, Nick begins to unravel a web of corruption and criminal ties that reach far beyond the boys’ murders. As the pair dig deeper, they discover connections to the so-called “Equestrian Mafia” and the shadowy world of Chicago’s organized crime. Readers fascinated by true-crime investigations and procedural detail will find much to engage with here. The novel excels in its depiction of midcentury police work and the ensuing media frenzy. The later sections, in which Nick and A.J. piece together decades-old clues, are equally compelling, offering both emotional weight and historical resonance. That said, what begins as a breathless, sharply paced thriller loses momentum—the minutiae of the original investigation can drag, and the courtroom sequences toward the end feel unnecessarily drawn out, dulling some of the tension built earlier in the book. Still, despite its pacing issues, the novel delivers an engrossing blend of crime, history, and moral reckoning.
A compelling portrait of crime and justice.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2026
ISBN: 9798868524421
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Mill City Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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