Trell

From the co-author of Black Mass comes a gripping YA novel inspired by the true story of a young man's false imprisonment for murder — and those who fought to free him.

On a hot summer night in the late 1980s, in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, a twelve-year-old African-American girl was sitting on a mailbox talking with her friends when she became the innocent victim of gang-related gunfire. Amid public outcry, an immediate manhunt was on to catch the murderer, and a young African-American man was quickly apprehended, charged, and — wrongly — convicted of the crime. Dick Lehr, a former reporter for the Boston Globe’s famous Spotlight Team who investigated this case for the newspaper, now turns the story into Trell, a page-turning novel about the daughter of an imprisoned man who persuades a reporter and a lawyer to help her prove her father’s innocence. What pieces of evidence might have been overlooked? Can they manage to get to the truth before a dangerous character from the neighborhood gets to them?

Dick Lehr is the co-author, with Gerard O'Neill, of Black Mass, a New York Times bestseller about Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger, which was made into a film starring Johnny Depp. His most recent book is The Birth of a Movement, which Booklist deemed in a starred review "a remarkable look at the power of mass media and the nascent civil rights movement at a pivotal time in American history." The book was adapted into a PBS documentary that aired on the network's primetime show, Independent Lens, in February 2017. Dick Lehr is a former reporter for the Boston Globe and now teaches journalism at Boston University. He lives near Boston.