Long Bright River

I can’t even tell you how many times in many years working for newspapers that I rushed out after hearing a body had been found in an empty house or neglected alley. In almost every case, I would arrive to have police officers tell me, “No story here. No homicide. Just another overdose.” The newspaper didn’t tally overdose deaths as it did murders, even if many fatalities are linked to heroin that has been mixed with fentanyl without the users’ knowledge. It’s very rare for those who sell the killer substance to face homicide charges. 

The city is basically another… show more.

This is a story of two siblings. Mickey is a police officer; her sister, Kacey, is a heroin-addicted prostitute. The setting is Kensington, a notorious drug-ravaged neighborhood in my hometown of Philadelphia. Kacey has gone missing, and Mickey fears she may have been the victim of a killer who’s been targeting prostitutes, so she inserts herself into the investigation. The dual mysteries—where’s Kacey, and who are the killers—give the story its shape. But the relationship between the sisters, the glimpses of their childhoods, and the depiction of growing up among addicts shooting up on the sidewalk and nodding off… show more.

I was immediately gripped by this gritty novel, not least because of Liz Moore’s talent in painting a specific place and community. Set in a working-class Philadelphia neighborhood devastated by the opioid crisis, this is a story of two sisters at the opposite ends of the law. Mickey always tried to leave, to become something other than what she saw around her. But she never did. She is now a cop, her beat the same streets in which she’d grown up, and the people she helps, or arrests, the same ones she’s known her entire life. I became utterly engrossed… show more.

This tense, gripping novel about the opioid crisis’s devastation of a family—of parents and children, siblings and cousins, and the extended family that’s a police force, all in Philadelphia—lays bare the intimate, heartbreaking costs of a mass epidemic. As has become abundantly clear in the past couple of years, we can all too easily become numb to massive numbers of sick and dead. It’s on the human scale of individuals, one person at a time who’s suffering and dying, that we can fully absorb the true costs of epidemics, whether of opioids or covid or whatever’s next. That’s what this… show more.