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I’ve probably mentioned this a bunch here (and it’s probably obvious from the books I review), but I can get a little geeky about different publishing imprints. This is probably a holdover behavior from my teenage years, being into hardcore/punk and you’d just go into the record store and buy records from bands you’d never heard of, simply because they were on a record label you liked. 

So, yeah. It’s a thing for me, for sure. And Soho Crime has been an imprint that’s really appealed to me a lot over the last couple years. So I took a chance and requested a copy of SAINT OF THE NARROWS STREET by William Boyle, and the folks at Soho were kind enough to send over a copy! So huge thanks, it’s always really cool to get copies to review from a new-to-me publisher! 

There are those rare books that feel like the exact right book at the exact right moment, and that’s how this one felt for me. Oof, for real, SAINT OF THE NARROWS STREET is a legit masterpiece & William Boyle is a wildly talented writer. This is one of the most beautiful & gut-wrenchingly sad pieces of crime fiction I’ve read since maybe Richard Price’s FREEDOMLAND. 

I’d say this one falls more under the literary crime fiction umbrella than it does thriller/mystery. This is a dialogue-driven story with tremendous character development. I’ll try to avoid much in the way of spoilers, but as I alluded to, this book is devastatingly sad. Fair warning.

The story begins in the late 1980’s, in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Gravesend. We meet our core group of main characters on a fateful night, and then follow their story all the way into the early 2000’s. 

One night, Risa Franzone’s abusive husband, Sav, points a gun at Risa and her baby, Fab. He pulls the trigger, but the gun is unloaded. Risa is rattled to her core, but tries to just keep on keeping on. Later that evening, her sister Giulia comes over after a messy breakup. There’s a lot of charged emotions in the room when Sav returns to pack some belongings, claiming he is leaving town with a woman he’s been having an affair with. Sav is drunk, gets confrontational, and puts his hands around Giulia’s throat. 

Risa loses it & smashes Sav in the head with a cast iron pan. He falls & hits his head on the table on his way to the floor, where he bleeds out and dies. Risa and Giulia choose to not call an ambulance. Instead they call Christopher “Chooch” Gardini, Sav’s childhood friend who is kinda-sorta-definitely carrying a torch for Risa. 

They drive to Chooch’s family’s mostly-abandoned cabin in upstate New York and bury Sav’s body. 

And that’s kind of the gist of things. The story then becomes about this trio of characters living with this secret for so many years. As you might expect, there’s plenty of fallout (a whole book’s worth). There’s mistrust, fear, rumors, suspicion, anger, grief. Basically the entire spectrum of human emotion here. There are glimpses of hope for a better future, of joy. But they are terribly fleeting. Again, this is just…a fucking heartbreaker of a novel. 

I have visited Brooklyn a time or two, but have never spent any significant amount of time there. But SAINT OF THE NARROWS STREET just completely transported me into this neighborhood. You really feel the passage of time along with these characters. You feel the world change around you, but you also feel this sort of insular protection the neighborhood provides the characters. It’s as comforting as it is suffocating. 

This is never more evident than when Fab has grown into a pretty rebellious teen himself, struggling with all the unknowns in life & desperate to break free. He’s grown up with the story that Risa, Giulia, and Chooch came up with: Sav took off one night, and no one ever heard from him again. So Fab has spent his whole life just wondering who his father was, trying to piece together any information he can. It’s hard on him & becomes the driving force in his life. 

I just loved these characters so much. They’re so messy & real. Risa is kind of a romantic at heart who fell for the wrong guy, which creates this spiraling effect that will impact her every single day. But she has a powerful love for her sister & her son, and I just really felt for Risa. 

Chooch is also a character you can’t help but love. As much as he was mixed up with the troublesome Sav when he was younger, he becomes a father figure for Fab & would literally do anything for Risa. There’s this sweetness/sadness to the relationship between Chooch & Risa that permeates the entire novel. 

This is a really special book. It’s always such a cool feeling to have your first book by an author be a home run, and yeah, I’m immediately a William Boyle fan. Really looking forward to checking out more of his work! 

SAINT OF THE NARROWS STREET wrecked me, full stop. This book broke my heart again & again & again, and knowing that, I would still go back and read this for the first time if I could. 

Huge thanks to Soho Press for sending this one my way!