One fateful day at Coney Island, Risa Taverna met Saverio Franzone, and something simply clicked between them. But theirs wasn’t a tender love story. Far from it, in fact. Risa’s sister, Giulia, had a bad feeling about Sav from the start. She warned Risa that he was trouble. But you know young love; nobody listens at that age. So Risa ignored all the warnings and married Sav, then regretted that decision ever after. In fact, she wished she had never even met him.

"Boyle has the rare talent of making readers fully feel a scene: a dank room, a deserted street, a seedy bar. Atmosphere is his specialty.... SAINT OF THE NARROWS STREET is my first five-star read of 2025."

The only good that came from meeting Sav was their son, Fabrizio. Little Fab was only eight months old the night his father died. He was there when his mother bashed Sav over the head with a cast-iron skillet. Risa didn’t mean to kill him; she just reacted. Sav came home drunk, wielding a gun, and told her that he was leaving them. But before he left, he started a fight. Thankfully, Giulia was there to defend her sister. Of course, Sav then turned his wrath on her. When the scuffle ended, Sav lay on the floor dead in a pool of his own blood. What to do now? Call the cops and claim self-defense? Well, that’s what it was, right? Or try to fix it themselves? They had to make a choice.

Risa decides to call Christopher, aka Chooch, a longtime friend of theirs. He’ll know what to do. It looks bad, but explaining it to the cops seems even riskier. Either way, their futures look sketchy. What’s done is done, but in the years ahead, Risa, Giulia and Chooch will be constantly looking over their shoulders. Sav was not a good guy; there’s no getting around that. But nobody could have forseen the consequences of his disappearance.

And what about Fab? He was just a baby. Of course he’ll have questions as he gets older. The more time that passes, the harder it will be to answer those questions and sound convincing. But Risa knows that day will come. When it does, should she tell Fab the whole truth? Will he understand? Then suddenly, that day arrives. Risa has to talk to her son. And there is no way that she possibly could have predicted what his reaction turns out to be.

SAINT OF THE NARROWS STREET is billed as a thriller, but it goes far beyond that. It’s the story of a family whose lives take a tragic turn and their attempts to deal with the fallout thereafter. William Boyle has created a group of characters who live on the same street, are in the same family and have the same friends, but they clash in awful ways that set them up for catastrophe. Then he drops them into horrible circumstances and has them struggle to get out.

Boyle has the rare talent of making readers fully feel a scene: a dank room, a deserted street, a seedy bar. Atmosphere is his specialty. Each character has an entirely complicated past that explains what they do in the present, why they say the words they now say, and why they keep making the mistakes they make. They are so richly put together that you believe you can hear their voices and see them twitch at an insult. You know they’re going to go down the wrong path even before they do, and you want to scream “No!” 

Wow, what a story. SAINT OF THE NARROWS STREET is my first five-star read of 2025.