In this gripping and electric novel, the grim horrors of Nazis in America collides with the manufacturing of the suburban dream—by a brilliant new voice in crime fiction.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Steve Wick’s The Ruins, which is out February 4th 2025.
On a fall night in 1954, in working-class Lindenhurst, Long Island, a woman goes alone to a bar filled with German speakers who’ve finished their shifts at different jobs—some at a groundbreaking new project run by a man named Leavitt. They are gathered to listen to the first game of the World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians at the Polo Grounds. The game would make the history books because of “The Catch” at the outfield wall by Willie Mays.
But Lindenhurst’s new chief of police, Paul Beirne, can’t think about baseball. Still struggling with the demons from his time as a POW in Japan during the war, he gets the call that a woman’s mutilated body is found in a field north of Lindenhurst, near where a new cemetery is being constructed to accommodate the growing suburbs. There hasn’t been a murder in the village in decades, and on top of this horrific crime, there is a suspicious accident on the railroad tracks.
Paul turns to his friend Doc, a Holocaust survivor and who, like Paul, suffers from the horrors of his past. But Paul has personal horrors, too, that are outside the purview of war. Or so he thinks. In stark contrast to the whitewashed ideal Leavitt and others in Lindenhurst are trying to create, an evil as taken root in Lindenhurst. What Paul and Doc uncover will lead Paul to another murder, one committed two decades before, as past and present, family and world war, collide in this intense and thrilling debut from a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.
He entered the funeral home through the back door, under the awning that read Liebmann Funeral Home. He took the stairs to the basement, where he found Doc standing over the body of the woman. The sight of something that had once been a human being, laid out on a steel table and gutted like a stockyard cow, knocked the wind out of him. His stomach seized up. His hands started to shake. He was looking at his own nightmare, on par with the one that had followed him around since childhood of being in his bed at night facing an unlocked window with a ladder leading up against the side of the house. He shook his head as if to clear it of demons.
The corpse’s pale skin glowed under the hot, bright lights overhead. The table was tilted at one end so that liquids could drain down and through a hole into a bucket on the floor. The body looked like it had been attacked by a man-eater that feasted on human flesh. Her skin was white as snow, except for a blue-black cave between her legs and bruises on the inside of her thighs that looked like paint had been splashed on them. Her mouth and eyes were half open. Her lower gums were absent of teeth.
Foul acid in Paul’s stomach heaved into the back of his throat and threatened to overwhelm him. He equated the rising bile in his stomach, burning its way to his throat, as similar to the contents of an overused cat litter box. He covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief, gagging loudly at the smell.
Doc ignored him, focused intently on his work.
Making everything far worse for Paul, the two halves of the train victim lay uncovered on a table pushed against the cinder block wall. The halves were lined up to make the corpse look whole, as if this were an exhibit in a freak show, along with a two-headed cow. Panic swelled in Paul’s chest.
Doc’s assistant, a baby-faced high school kid, stared at the woman’s corpse with a strange look of fascination on his face.
“This boy should not be down here, Doc,” Paul said.
Doc didn’t hear him. Paul motioned for the kid to go upstairs. “She has no blood left in her,” Doc said.
At first, Paul wasn’t sure what Doc had said, although Liebmann tamped down his accent
and enunciated every word.
“You mean—what?”
“She would have been screaming the whole time. Someone must have heard this, Paul. She was alive through all of it. She died because of massive blood loss, after her assailant had left. Her heart was still beating when he turned his back on her and strolled away. She may have lived another twenty minutes. You understand the suffering involved here? The person who did this has very large hands.”
“You can tell that?”
“Definitely.”
He held up both of his hands, which were small and delicate, with the long fingers of a serious pianist, which he was. Even standing in a small basement room dominated by two ripped-apart corpses, Doc gave off an air of culture and education that Paul, who had been second to last in his Lindenhurst High School class, found impressive. His calmness, his ability to focus on the task before him without distraction, seemed unnatural.
“The killer’s hand is larger than two of mine, Paul. I know this is a bit overwhelming, but you need to pay close attention to what I am saying.”
How does a human being do something like this?
The temperature in the windowless room topped out. A Niagara of sweat poured down Paul’s back. The cat litter box in his stomach kicked into high gear. He watched as Doc unclipped his silver cufflinks and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt to reveal the inexplicable. Paul had seen this once or twice before. He knew what to expect. There was the capital A, followed by four numbers, tattooed on the forearm in bluish ink.
A1828.
Dear God, what is that?
Seeing it again jerked him up short: a man branded. He turned away. He did not want Doc to see him staring. He shook off the thought that in the six years he had worked with Doc, he had never asked him what it was, how it got there. Doc was as silent about his past as Paul was about his. The big difference between the two men was that Doc somehow managed his past, whereas Paul’s past owned him. Doc’s history showed on his face, in his eyes, his demeanor, and how he carried himself. Doc’s past was there for Paul to try to discern. Still, somehow, Doc lived in the present, something Paul never learned.
Excerpted from chapter two of The Ruins by Steve Wick. Shared with permission from Pegasus Crime, out February 4th, 2025.
