Electric Literature : “The Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books for Summer 2023”
New York Times Editors’ Choice
One of Vanity Fair's "20 Favorite Books of 2023
Debutiful Best Book of the Year
One of CrimeReads' Best Crime Novels of 2023
“Hertz has managed to tell a story of queer healing with all the narrative force of a thriller and the searing fury of an indictment.” —The New York Times Book Review
A fearless debut novel of resilience, transcendence, and the elusive promise of justice.
Growing up in suburban New York, Dylan lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of Vincent, a troubled young man who promised to marry Dylan when he turned eighteen. Years later—long after a police investigation that went nowhere, and after the statute of limitations for the crimes perpetrated against him have run out—the long shadow of Dylan’s trauma still looms over the fragile life in the city he’s managed to build with his fiancé, Moans, who knows little of Dylan’s past. His continued existence depends upon an all-important mantra: To survive, you live through it, but never look back.
Then a groundbreaking new law—the Child Victims Act—opens a new way foreword: a one-year window during which Dylan can sue his abusers. But for someone who was trafficked as a child, does money represent justice—does his pain have a price? As Dylan is forced to look back at what happened to him and try to make sense of his past, he begins to explore a drug and sex-fueled world of bathhouses, clubs, and strangers’ apartments, only to emerge, barely alive, with a new clarity of purpose: a righteous determination to gaze, unflinching, upon the brutal men whose faces have haunted him for a decade, and to extract justice on his own terms.
