The Lookback Window

Book excerpt: New York Times Editors’ Choice Vanity Fair's 20 Favorite Books of 2023 Debutiful Best Book of the Year Crimereads Best Debut of August “Hertz has managed to tell a story of queer healing with all the narrative force of a thriller and the searing fury of an indictment.” —The New York Times Book Review A fearless debut novel of resilience, transcendence, and the elusive promise of justice. Brooklyn, 2019. Dylan has lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking as a teen. Now years later—long after a police investigation that went nowhere with the domestic life he built to survive—the Child Victims Act opens up a way forward: a one-year window to sue past abusers, but once the lookback window starts, Dylan seeks answers everywhere: in the druggy reveries of Fire Island to the love-drunk strangers of summer nights downtown and the lawyers who watch over the park, finally emerging from an erotic and violent spiral with a new clarity of purpose: a righteous determination to gaze, unflinching, upon the brutal men whose faces have haunted him for a decade, and to extract justice on his own terms.