Favorite Sons: A Novel (U)

Hutch Van Buren is fifteen years old, playing sports and searching for arrowheads in a small industrial town in Ohio with his three closest friends when an altercation between them and Petey Sanchez, a troubled seventeen-year-old, leads to Petey’s accidental death. Vowing a pact of silence, they allow a local ne’er-do-well to go to jail for the crime. As they grow older, each boy shoulders the burden of truth in his own way as each attempts to leave the past behind. Thirty-three years later, in 2004, Van Buren is the prosecuting attorney in Summit County, Ohio, and a candidate for state attorney general when he learns that he and his boyhood friends weren’t the only ones keeping a secret about Petey’s death. A convicted sex offender in need of a favor attempts to blackmail Van Buren in return for his silence. Van Buren must decide between his political career and the duty of the office he has sworn to uphold. With the clock ticking, Van Buren has a week to seek out his boyhood friends and search his soul while he sorts out three decades of deceit he helped create. This suspenseful novel with nuanced, memorable characters was named Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense by USA Book News, was selected for the Choose to Read Ohio program for 2013–14, and was a featured book of the 2012 Ohioana Book Festival.