Why You'll Love This
Two ordinary teachers convince themselves a convicted child killer is innocent — and then decide to break him out of prison.
- Great if you want: true-crime obsession turned into a morally murky thriller
- The experience: brisk and propulsive with a slow-building dread underneath
- The writing: Fox keeps the reader just as deceived as her protagonists — deliberately
- Skip if: a 3.5 average hints this one divides readers sharply
About This Book
Two high school teachers with too much time and too many doubts stumble into the orbit of a convicted child killer — and convince themselves they know better than the jury that put him away. Set against the humid, close-knit atmosphere of South Carolina's low country, this is a story about obsession, loneliness, and the dangerous gap between believing someone and truly knowing them. Candice Fox understands that true-crime culture doesn't just entertain — it seduces, and she builds her novel around that seduction with unsettling precision. The stakes are personal and moral in equal measure: what happens when two ordinary women bet everything on a man who may or may not deserve it?
Fox writes with a sharp, propulsive efficiency that keeps pages turning without sacrificing the psychological texture that gives the story its teeth. The dual focus on Amber and Leticia allows the book to explore how two people can absorb the same information and arrive at the same flawed conclusion by completely different emotional routes. It's the kind of crime fiction that's less interested in whodunit than in why otherwise sensible people choose to believe what they desperately want to be true.