WHAT HAPPENED TO RUTHY RAMIREZ by Claire Jiménez

Angela Singh wrestles with the typical teenage travails: worrying over the distance growing between her and her best friend, Sam McCleary; managing an unrequited crush on Sam’s brother, Henry; training to stay competitive on the swim team; and navigating an often fraught relationship with her single dad, who’s been raising her on his own since she was 6. However, her world is turned upside down when, walking home from swim practice one day, she finds Henry on the football field, having been stabbed in the abdomen. The affluent town of Kitchewan, New York, becomes enmeshed in a web of social politics, gossip, and backroom power plays as everyone attempts to defend their innocence. Or perhaps the incident merely uncovers the racial and economic tensions that always existed in the town, especially as Chiara Thompkins, a Black teenager, emerges at the center of the drama. Angela, whose memory of finding Henry remains blurry, must navigate her torn loyalties to her family and friends, self-preservation, and her sense of justice as she grows more deeply entangled in the community’s investigation into what exactly happened that day at the school. Rotating among multiple perspectives and moving backward and forward in time, the novel intertwines teenage drama with an incisive intersectional exploration of the complexities of intergenerational immigrant families, class, and racism. Jain tackles the novel’s themes effectively and subtly for the most part, especially in the beginning. The final chapters seem rushed, diluting the complexity and drama that made the first two-thirds so riveting and resulting in a too-tidy ending.

A powerful, story-driven exploration of some of today’s most pressing social issues.

WHAT HAPPENED TO RUTHY RAMIREZ

Jiménez, Claire Grand Central Publishing (240 pp.) $28.00 | March 7, 2023 9781538725962

A story of family, fury, a missing girl, and what society doesn’t see. Twelve years ago, 13-year-old Ruthy Ramirez disappeared after track practice one day, never to be seen again. Left in the black hole where there is “no such thing now as a map” are the women in Ruthy’s family, who never get over her loss. Told from the alternating perspectives of Ruthy’s younger and older sisters, Nina and Jessica; her mother, Dolores; and Ruthy herself, this is a story of the fights women encounter and the ways they survive, set in a Pentecostal Puerto Rican community in Staten Island. More than a decade after Ruthy’s disappearance, Jessica is convinced she’s seen her on Catfight, a reality TV series where women literally fight their cast-mates to stay in the town house where they’re filming and win the grand prize. Jessica and Nina begin binge-watching the show, analyzing every detail about the woman onscreen, comparing her with their memories of Ruthy and their expectations of whether a near-homeless raging alcoholic is the woman Ruthy could have grown up to become. They try to keep this secret from their diabetic mother, but their plan unravels when Dolores figures out that they’re not heading off to a retreat for young Christian women but are instead driving to Boston, where the show is filmed. The three end up roadtripping together, along with a friend, and it’s Dolores, not her daughters, who schemes her way into a nightclub where the Catfight girls will perform. There’s a delightfully subversive and maverick quality to the way first-time novelist Jiménez gives her characters the freedom to tell the truth as they see it, whether it’s Dolores negotiating with God in expletive-laden prayers or Nina explaining the fallout of graduating from college with an expensive biology degree only to end up folding lingerie for a toxic White boss. The book’s humor alongside Jiménez’s willingness to include everything from pop culture to intergenerational trauma is the reason this book is a page-turner.

Jiménez brings bravery to the page, and it’s her strong storytelling and humor that make this an outstanding debut.

“A well-crafted spy novel married to a serial killer mystery equals lots of dark drama.”

black wolf

BLACK WOLF

Kent, Kathleen Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (400 pp.) $29.00 | Feb. 14, 2023 9780316280211

Spies, nuclear scientists, and a serial killer collide in the twilight of the Soviet Union. It’s 1990. As the Soviet Union crumbles, four CIA agents are sent to Belorussia, ostensibly to offer America’s financial assistance to the newly independent country but in truth to evaluate the stability of the republic and to see who might be stepping into the power void. The youngest agent, Melvina Donleavy, has a more specific assignment still—to confirm whether three Iranian men are seeking to acquire nuclear weapons or uranium. Mel has a unique gift: She is able to recall the face of any person she has ever seen, and identify them, even within a crowd of hundreds. As the agents seek to make connections and uncover information in Belorussia, Mel keeps her own counsel, helped by an American expatriate scientist named William Cutler. After a young secretary Mel was attempting to befriend is found dead, the agents learn that women have been disappearing around the city. Mel, whose father was a cop, begins to suspect that there’s a serial killer in action. When she crosses paths with the Black Wolf, KGB chief Martin Kavalchuk, Mel’s life and the lives of her colleagues are soon in peril. To complete her mission, she will have to endure arrest, torture, and captivity—and the serial killer who has become obsessed with her. Kent’s novel is based on real-life people and events in the gritty Belorussia of this era, and the characters and their experiences are well drawn and complex. At the same time, the story moves well; the tensions are high; the climax action-packed. Kent brings her gift for building strong and complex female characters, honed in the Betty Rhyzyk series, to Mel, who is younger, softer, and still just as much a survivor.

A well-crafted spy novel married to a serial killer mystery equals lots of dark drama.