First published 2013
Michael Hainey was six years old when his uncle arrived at the back door with devastating news. His father Bob, a thirty-five-year-old assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, had been discovered dead beside his car on Chicago's North Side. The official cause was heart attack, but the circumstances remained murky. The obituary stated he died "after visiting friends," yet no one would say which friends or where he had been. Decades later, Michael becomes a reporter himself and decides to uncover what really happened that night. His investigation leads him through Chicago's hard-drinking newspaper culture of the 1970s, where loyalty codes and silence protect old secrets. His mother refuses to discuss the past, while his father's former colleagues maintain their wall of secrecy. As Michael pieces together fragments of that fatal evening, he discovers truths about both his parents that reshape his understanding of his family. His search becomes a journey into a vanished world of newspapermen and the fierce bonds that held them together, revealing how the past continues to shape the present.
Genres: american-fiction, 20th-century, mystery, non-fiction, biography-memoir, journalism
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-secrets, personal-history, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Chicago, Chicago North Side
Period: 1970s
307 pages · Hardcover · Scribner