Grim, intelligent, and quietly explosive.
Set against the political tensions of 1960s Washington, Charns’s latest novel traces the cost of truth in a system engineered to suppress it. 1966, Washington. When George Smith, a jailed Black teenager, claims he holds a secret capable of destroying a Supreme Court justice, his court-appointed lawyer, Mitch Pilsudski, is drawn into a case that exposes the limits of the law itself. As Mitch searches for the truth, he discovers that justice is designed less to protect the vulnerable than to contain risk. With the FBI quietly tightening its grip on the High Court, backroom negotiations, suppressed evidence, and moral compromise begin to shape the fate of men positioned on opposite ends of power.
Charns grounds the novel in real historical material, drawing inspiration from FBI records and unresolved questions surrounding the Supreme Court in the 1960s. The story locates its moral weight in what George is denied rather than what he is accused of. Charns avoids sensational detail. Instead, he focuses on the procedural mechanisms that make George’s fate unavoidable. Earnest and underprepared, Mitch is sketched with authenticity. His struggle is incremental rather than heroic, defined by frustration and constraint. Clear-eyed about power and unsentimental about its costs, Carlyle provides a grounded counterpoint. The courtroom scenes resist dramatic reversals; their power lies in absence—no meaningful doubt, no intervention, no structural correction. Judges and prosecutors need not conspire; the system’s defaults do the work for them.
Running parallel to the personal stakes of the story is a disturbing look at how power functions when no one is watching. The Supreme Court is depicted as a human institution driven by loyalty, fear, and the instinct to protect itself. Ethical lines soften quickly when careers and legacies hang in the balance. Looming quietly over every decision is the FBI, ever-present yet unseen, shaping outcomes through surveillance and coercion. Corruption here is not dramatic or reckless; it is administrative, carefully justified, and brutally effective. Charns offers no consolation. There are no revelations that restore balance, no reckonings that redeem the system. Truth survives only in fragments, justice only as process rather than principle. Written in disciplined, unadorned prose, this is a sober meditation on complicity and power, insisting that injustice is not an aberration of the system but one of its most reliable outcomes.
Readers who loved the institutional reckonings of Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys and the moral severity of Richard Wright’s Native Son will want to take a look.
Pub date January 7, 2026
ISBN 979-8242386570
Length 193 pages
Price $18.00 (USD) Hardcover, $10.00 Paperback, $0.00 Kindle unlimited
