THE FAMILY SNITCH: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies, or "how to reintegrate after surviving a toxic system"

THE FAMILY SNITCH: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies
FRANCESCA FONTANA
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A journalist’s relentless, unsparing interrogation of family ties, the ways we deceive ourselves and others, and how we live with what we’ve done

A stunning debut, perfect for fans of Nicole Chung, Ashley C. Ford, and David Carr's The Night of the Gun

Francesca's parents represented opposing world-views. Her mother always slid her way out of questions about the past, saying only “My life started when you were born.” Her dad, an absent bodybuilder, loved telling stories about his seemingly larger-than-life past. He said he would tell her anything she wanted to know. But more often than not, it was a total lie. When Francesa was 9, he went to prison, and her mother, the grounding center of Francesca's world, moved her half a continent away...

The Family Snitch started as a youthful experiment in journalistic investigation. Francesca began to uncover her father's secret criminal past. But in her increasingly dogged pursuit of the truth at any cost, was she just selling everybody out?

In her thought-provoking exploration, Francesca also interrogates her own relationship to the truth, finding that she trusts almost no one and refuses to believe anything that can’t be backed by hard evidence. She turns to experts on memory and psychology, in search of someone to help explain the secrets kept between parents and children, and the inheritances they leave us in the fallout of their choices. She pulls on the threads that lead her back through the forms that came before this theater and film, Greek tragedy and myth.

The result is a page-turning memoir that is also an artful work of literature with enduring appeal.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Confronting your past is a big part of the job of growing up. Learning the realities of your origins can be discomfiting. Myths that take root are rooted in misunderstandings, lies believed, facts spun...it's astounding how much looking for official records can teach you. If, of course, you know where to look...and that the records exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, after all.

Frankie, as the author chooses to be known in the book, grows up in a very troubled system. Her family is riven by silent elisions, careful misdirections; she comes to develop a full-blown case of OCD that becomes the giant power source for her journalism. Talk about making lemonade from life's lemons!

Lemonade is sour under the sweet, though. I read this book thinking how much expectation Frankie was leaving aside as she told this brutally painful story of the betrayal she felt as she discovered how little truth there was in her family in a reportorial style. Most memoir readers...I think we're past the peak of the memoir craze, it's solidified into a market with expectations...want to experience catharsis, weep buckets, feel the hollow burn of referred rage...not really available here. I thought Frankie's choice to narrate events was more affecting for its restraint. I'm not necessarily going to resonate to messy, splashy, look-at-me pyrotechnics. It's true the narrative switches from first to third person at seemingly unprompted intervals, but I came to realize this was Frankie's way of inserting her self into the narrative at the times it felt safe to her to do so.

For me, then, realizing the roots of Frankie's control in her demonstrated inability to trust anything or anyone in her family of origin made her decision to write the story at all an act of generous-spirited bravery, so the relatively matter-of-fact prose heightened my own experience of the read. It won't be to everyone's taste but I'd encourage you to look at the actual details before dismissing the style: A big, warm, largely absent daddy who tells you "anything you want to know" but in such a self-aggrandizing tone even your kid-self wonders, a mother who's a fogbank, impossible to pin down, so evasive she tells you the reason she's alive at all is you.

No pressure, child, just know your mother's *entire*life*is*your*reponsibility.

How Frankie made it to adulthood and used the gargantuan burdens heaped on her to become Author Fontana is astonishing. By rights no one would criticize her if she just huddled in a corner gibbering quietly to herself to try to make sense of her life. Instead we got this remarkable account of facing up to a past rife with stressors, replete with bad parenting, and lived in an unshareable bubble. How many friends do you have who could hang with you as you process your father's criminal history?

It's the main story, of course. Frankie has, that bloody OCD demands it, to dig in and determine the facts at last. What happened, when, who did he harm, why was it done. I'm always just a bit squicked out by true-crime entertainment. The victim (if alive) realizing strangers are judging them, harshly or not, is...distressing...to me; the family of the perpetrator likewise. It's both justice (if legal results are obtained) and not, re-experiencing traumas and having them made public property. Ask a writer who's had a really bad review how it affects one's emotional well-being to be exposed to every irritating twidgee with a keyboard and an opinion. Now blow it up ten times because it's not anything you asked for.

So I'm in two minds. Brava to Frankie for doing the work; has Author Fontana really thought this through? I dunno, nothing in the story or the later discussions tells me. I don't know how that would be accomplished without *major* spoilers; I get why it isn't done, but it leaves me ambivalent about the story's purpose not necessarily being one I can get all the way behind. Missing star thus explained.

I've seen many indifferent-to-poor memoirs burn up the sales charts. I'd like to see this brave, kind, generous soul join them. She deserves the worldly success.

THE EDGE OF GUILT might better be called the swamp or morass of guilt...but guilt there is

THE EDGE OF GUILT
DAVID MIRALDI
Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Heather was only fifteen when she died by suicide.
Her father wants justice.
The system wants silence.

After his daughter’s tragic death, Dennis is devastated, convinced that her psychiatrist is to blame. Desperate for accountability, he seeks an attorney to settle the score.

Enter Paul Schofield, a struggling attorney who impulsively takes the case, hoping for a quick settlement. But the deeper he digs, the more he uncovers buried secrets, conflicting loyalties, and ethical dilemmas that shake him to his core. As courtroom tensions rise, relationships fracture, alliances shift, and the line between justice and greed begins to blur.

Inspired by true events, The Edge of Guilt is a gripping legal drama that delves into the gray areas of justice, morality, and grief—captivating readers from the first page and resonating long after the final verdict.

Perfect for fans of Defending Jacob by William Landay, Reversible Errors by Scott Turow, and Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, this story blends courtroom suspense with emotional depth and real-world ethical complexity.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Legal dramas don't come much more grabby than a grieving father trying to wrap his head around his child's death. Failing that, he sets out to get revenge, or as he thinks of it, "Justice."

The big issue is an Eternal Verity: NEVER START A LAWSUIT IF YOU'RE GUILTY. Of what, well, look at Oscar Wilde if you just want a case study of why this is the world's worst idea. The author's a civil lawyer, so no doubt accustomed to lying clients. I'm not all the way convinced that isn't why there's a twist at the latter stages of the story...was that really a good idea is not settled in my mind.

The real characters here are the lawyer and the father. They eat all our attention, seemingly by design as there aren't any female characters including the dead daughter who speak much still less say anything important.

I won't say it was my favorite read of May 2025 but I never rolled my eyes and resisted picking it up. The comps above seem accurate to me. I liked the Landay book pretty much exactly the same intensity as I liked this one, and for similar reasons of moral complexity. If you like courtroom dramas, this definitely makes its bones there; if you're after a solid tale of grief managed poorly, here you go; if you like a surprise ending, the kettle's on in Author Miraldi's story kitchen.

56 DAYS, a super-suspenseful story that wins on every level

56 DAYS
CATHERINE RYAN HOWARD
Blackstone Publishing
$19.99 hardcover, available now

NOW $1.99 ON KINDLE! (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4.5* of five

A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY 2021 BEST BOOK FOR ADULTS RECOMMENDATION!

The Publisher Says: No one knew they'd moved in together. Now one of them is dead. Could this be the perfect murder?

56 DAYS AGO
Ciara and Oliver meet in a supermarket queue in Dublin the same week Covid-19 reaches Irish shores.

35 DAYS AGO
When lockdown threatens to keep them apart, Oliver suggests that Ciara move in with him. She sees a unique opportunity for a new relationship to flourish without the pressure of scrutiny of family and friends. He sees it as an opportunity to hide who - and what - he really is.

TODAY
Detectives arrive at Oliver's apartment to discover a decomposing body inside.

Will they be able to determine what really happened, or has lockdown provided someone with the opportunity to commit the perfect crime?

I RECEIVED THIS AS A YULE GIFT. THANK YOU, KIND ELF!

My Review: There’s always room for the thriller genre to expand. It’s been a generation since gay characters were allowed to live past the ending, as mysteries made their peace with us in the Brandstetter books; we’ve been promoted to sleuths! It’s been a generation, too, since heroines were normalized in the hardboiled end of the genre, with Sue Grafton’s damaged and flawless Kinsey Milhone.

But what hasn’t happened all that often, and what still feels surprising and fresh and fun to read, is the moral grayness of female thriller leads. They’ve been haunted; they’ve been vengeful; but they’ve either Done Wrong and Suffered, or Been Victims and Suffered. Isn’t that tedious? Isn’t that unrealistic? I know actual women, I know they’re (mostly!) neither Supervillainesses without a shred of conscience or Saintly Martyrs. They’re messy, muddleheaded people. They fuck up, they attempt to atone for it, they make awful mistakes and terrible decisions. They are, in other words, just...people.

Fiction hasn’t adjusted to the reality of women’s ordinariness. But Catherine Ryan Howard has.

Ciara Murphy is an ordinary, plain-old-folks, woman. She is about to turn herself into a pretzel of anxiety when we meet her because an impossibly handsome man has just Noticed Her and she isn’t able to believe that he’s actually behaving like a decent guy who’s just seen someone he wants to get to know better. That doesn’t happen between Adonis-like men called something as elegant as Oliver Kennedy and pleasantly plain lasses like her. Happen, however, it does:

And he’s so attractive that she knows instantly the world he lives in is not the same one in which she does, that he can’t possibly experience it the same way. A face like that affords a different kind of existence, one in which you arrive into every situation with some degree of preapproval. But you don’t know it, don’t reavlize that you’re being ushered into the priority lane of life every single day.

She wonders what that does to a person.

Nothing good, Ciara. Nothing good, and sometimes quite terrible things. As we’re all aware, there is male privilege and there is nothing good that comes from the possession of that plus good looks plus...though this is Ireland, and therefore the whitest of the white-people countries...white privilege. But Ciara’s white, too, and it’s time to face up to this book’s blind spot. Everyone in this story is a privileged and spoiled First Worlder having seriously First-World problems.

She keeps a screenshot on her phone of a quote by, supposedly, Abraham Lincoln: Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want the most. Maybe that’s true, but discipline has never been her problem. It’s fear she struggles with. She thinks courage might be choosing between what you want now and what you want most, because what she wants now is to walk away, to shut this down, to close the door.

That said, we move on. And it’s where we move on to that makes 56 Days a deeply compelling, fully absorbing, surprisingly exciting thriller.

We know as readers that the purpose of a thriller is to thrill. Often that comes in the form of action, chase scenes, danger and blood and pain as Events Unfold. But this story is set on the brink of a worldwide pandemic and its uncertainty, its movement-restricting lockdown(s), its fear of others and its focus on somehow staying safe. But safety means different things to Oliver Kennedy and to Ciara Murphy. How much different is what what becomes so clear after the scene is set. They’re going to spend the lockdown cocooned together. This is, for reasons that are slowly and steadily brought into focus, something each urgently desires. They’re both unable to believe their luck, the way the world’s conspired to give them what the need the most.

They’ve been on a few dates. That, and some sex, and an undeniably mutual sense of their rightness of fit together, is what they decide when they’re forced by the pandemic to choose between lockdown apart and forming their own household. They each know they’re being rushed into this too fast; they each decide, for their own reasons, to make the lockdown into an opportunity to explore the new, strange-to-each sense of connection they’re experiencing. Neither decides to share their decision with others in their lives. I sure as heck wouldn’t, would you? Imagine the lectures, the sermonizing, the sheer next-to-panic worry the decision would evoke in a loving family member or even a very good friend. I’d be harping on the idiocy of thinking you know someone who’s barely even an acquaintance enough to spend two weeks of 24/7 days with them!

And now, I suspect there’s something you’re beginning to notice isn’t adding up. I’ve called this story a thriller. And it’s taking place in lockdown. A notoriously sedentary and isolated time. What kind of thriller are we going to get out of that? Just lots of sex, of discovery that Mr. Right is barely Mr. Right Now and Miss Congeniality is in fact vanilla ice cream with blue cheese dressing?

Author Howard has prepared a path for us that takes us into and back out of the past in several layers. The chapters are titled things like “23 Days Ago” and “Now” and the like. Each “Now” chapter focuses on the national police of Ireland, the Garda, investigating the discovery of a dead, badly decomposed body in a new, upscale apartment development. The lives of the senior investigating officers are sketched in but are done so in a way I found compelling and convincing. Like the senior officer getting a text from her junior that he needs her to come unlock him from the handcuffs his last lay left him hooked to the headboard with. We don’t get details. We do get some banter and some clues to the relationship she has with her foolish Sergeant.

What we also get is the certainty that we’re in good storytelling hands. In a chapter of under three thousand words we’re clear that she’s a good friend, a solid mentor, and he’s a foolish risk-taking adrenaline junkie with a great future behind him. They’re going to do everything they can figure out together to solve the puzzle of a dead person in a shower whose name they don’t know and whose life is so unmoored to anyone that the reason the body was discovered is the smell of it rotting bothered the people living in the same hall.

It is in these jump-cuts, these bits of time out of order, that the tapestry of awful crime and condign punishment play out. It is Ciara’s and Oliver’s story, as deeply intertwined and as messily disguised as each facet is, that keeps readerly fingers flipping pages. (Tapping them, in my case; this was a Kindle purchase using up 99¢ of a gift card.) As the points of view shift each time there’s a new date, more and more of the dead body’s tale of woes and wretchedness and unbearably poignant longing to explain and comfort and make things better comes into focus. There is never just one strand to the story. There is never just one angle of attack from which we’re approaching it, as Ciara and Oliver each reveal to the reader how few facts they’re revealing to each other. Every perspective shift offers a different story, both being told and potentially veering off from what has happened...there is a rotting body in a shower in an apartment.

It’s the why of it that is so gripping not the what. It’s the uncertainty that Author Howard uses to make us care...who is the dead person? Why are they dead? How and when did it happen?...over and over, on more and more layers of facts gleaned and fitted into the central puzzle of who the victim is. That answer is revealed as each layer of fact, each question answered, build the shape of the truth underneath the simple set up. A dead body is found in a shower by gardaí called to make a wellness check in a pandemic lockdown.

When all is revealed, as it is, the tense and frustrating ride is very much worth taking. It was never going to be exactly what I expected it to be, as I expected. After all, it’s a thriller. The point of the genre’s conventions is to go on a journey, to make one’s expectations go in ways the answer will not. As accustomed to that fact as I am, I was not expecting the resolution to the central mystery to take the final twist that it did. I’m not at all sure that it was the resolution, in fact; I can see Author Howard’s wicked little smile and devilishly quirked eyebrow as the facts she presents are snapped into a solid, firmly fitting pattern.

That isn’t at all the Truth. Unless it is. But it...really, honestly...might not be. It might be a shadow cast in a weird way by the always fickle Moon moving in its speedy course.

Lies are spindly, unwieldy things. Delicate filaments, like bundles of nerves in the body. Easy to twist, hard to control, impossible to keep hold of.

At the end of this story, Ciara Murphy and Oliver Kennedy are each deeply enmeshed in delicate, twisted filaments of lies told, believed, sold to a desperate self in need of something to hold on to. At the end of this story, there is no ending because the Truth can’t be packaged by being sculpted from facts. In the end, I think the best thrillers are the ones that obey the rules of evidence, that make sure you have facts that matter and are making the story make sense; this story does that at every turn.

Then it stands the facts on their spindly, delicate bundles, and shows you that the truth is you can’t be sure there’s any Truth in the facts. But there’s a thumping good read in them and a pleasure to be derived from their collection. (Just ignore the five (5) w-bombs.)

PERSECUTION, trial by media and innuendo & how that destroys lives

PERSECUTION
ALESSANDRO PIPERNO (tr. Ann Goldstein)
Europa Editions
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: In a sprawling villa on the outskirts of Rome, the members of the Pontecorvo family have gathered for dinner. Leo Pontecorvo, an internationally revered pediatric oncologist, is forty-eight. His wife, Rachel, is a physician and the loving mother to Filippo and Samuel, two amiable pre-teens. The evening news is on in the living room but nobody pays it any attention until Dr. Pontecorvo's name surfaces from the background noise and a news item airs that will change the lives of the Pontecorvos forever.

Leo Pontecorvo has been publicly accused of a vile crime. A spotlight is turned on him that reveals the mistakes, regrets, and contradictions of a lifetime. Every detail of his private and professional life is about to come under scrutiny, to be debated by both friends and foes, by ravenous reporters and punctilious prosecutors. But Leo could bear all this if it weren't for the suspicious gazes of his wife and children. Surely they, of all people, believe in his innocence!

Alessandro Piperno is widely acknowledged as one of today's most talented European novelists. His voice is singular and shocking at times, yet always possessed of tenderness and enormous generosity of heart. His vision is broad and encompassing, his psychological insights penetrating and undeniable. In this deeply felt family drama, Alessandro Piperno paints a broad canvas and fills it with psychologically complex characters whom readers will instantly recognize and never forget.

Europa Editions provided this copy in a Goodreads giveaway. Thank you.

My Review: Words can not only hurt, not only damage...they can kill. They can annihilate, destroy utterly the target of the carelessly spoken or maliciously uttered or calculatedly disseminated words. They can blow up a life, a family, a career, a vocation, they can eviscerate the worthy and worthwhile work a person has done.

And what if they're true? What if they're not true? Half true? He said, she said? It doesn't matter at all. Words, when spoken, can only be forgiven but never forgotten.

Piperno's novel of a Jewish pediatric oncologist's fall from the pinnacle of his life-saving profession is profoundly unsettling. It is discursive in style, and it is peculiarly intimate because of that. Very few paragraphs lead directly to the subject allegedly at hand, but all of them, each of them, serves to build the image of the Pontecorvo world, that of Dottore Leo, la signora Rachel, the pre-teen boys, Telma the Filipina maid...all these intersecting, interlocking worlds are completely and finally and irrevocably smashed and cannot be restored, only re-formed. The tracks in the thickets of words Piperno creates are like the game spoor a hunter follows, requiring patience and attention to interpret and encouraging the reader, the hunter, to look around carefully, to attend to the landscape as much as the path.

Ann Goldstein ably translates the Italian text in such a way as to suggest the varying uses made of familiar and formal address. It's a very hard thing to do, and it's impressive to see the job done so well. Part of the job of a translator is to create the mood of the original in a different idiom...never does Goldstein do this better than in the passages where the snobbery and class-consciousness that Leo faces when others refer to or speak to his wife, daughter of an observant Jew who also happens to be a businessman, in contrast to his more assimilated, haute bourgeois background.

I was transported in the reading of this novel, though not to a lovely sweet cotton-candy land of milk and honey. (Frankly, that's always sounded revolting to me. Not to mention sticky.) I was immersed in the life of the disintegrating Pontecorvo family. I emerged after a catharsis feeling, oddly, buoyed up, able to see the shore and feel the water of the sad existence below me support me as I started for solid ground.