Conviction

Starred review from January 30, 2017
In Dahl’s outstanding third novel featuring Brooklyn freelance reporter Rebekah Roberts (after 2015’s Run You Down), Rebekah agrees to help DeShawn Perkins, who claims he’s innocent of the crime that sent him to prison at age 16—murdering his foster parents and foster sister in 1992. DeShawn claims that a cop, who unquestioningly accepted a crack addict’s ID of him, coerced his confession. The narrative alternates between the original murder investigation in Crown Heights, where riots pitted Orthodox Jews and black residents against each other, and Rebekah’s present-day sleuthing in the quickly gentrifying neighborhood. Many of the case’s original players are still out there, including Rebekah’s formerly Orthodox ex-cop friend, Saul Katz; the woman in line to be the next Brooklyn DA; and the highly dubious eyewitness, all of whom have something to fear from Rebekah’s probing. Dahl excels at revealing the inner workings of enigmatic subcultures while maintaining peak suspense. She also provides a terrific “whoa, I didn’t see that coming” moment. Agent: Stephanie Rostan, Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.

February 1, 2017
Hard-bitten tabloid reporter Rebekah Roberts returns to investigate a decades-old triple murder case in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, finding not only a potential wrongful conviction, but also some disquieting revelations close to her own home.Despite her admirable track record for thawing cold murder cases, Roberts is still stringing for the bottom-feeding New York Tribune, camping outside a movie mogul's Tribeca apartment building one day and haranguing a Kings County DA candidate about missed child support the next. Rebekah's hope that somebody, somewhere in this city must be doing real journalism is consummated when she meets a Brooklyn-based blogger who closely tracks every homicide in the five boroughs. Through this blogger, Rebekah sees a handwritten letter from a convict named DeShawn Perkins who insists he was wrongfully convicted of slaughtering a black Crown Heights family in the summer of 1992. What really grabs Rebekah's attention is that one of the detectives working the case was Saul Katz, who is now the boyfriend of Rebekah's long-estranged mother, Aviva, who abandoned Rebekah as a child and hid deep within Brooklyn's Hasidic Jewish community. (Rebekah's fraught relationship with her mother is chronicled in Dahl's two previous mysteries, Invisible City (2014) and 2015's Run You Down.) Juggling time frames more than 20 years apart, Dahl's lean, hard narrative unravels a sad, squalid, and all-too-timely tale of deception in high and low places, deeply embedded racial animosities, and judicial mischief plausible enough to make readers wonder anew how many real-life DeShawns are in similar circumstances. Dahl shows great command over the darker, creepier elements of her genre and will keep you reading by her deft yet unobtrusive deployment of plot twists--and there are many of these going off like small explosives along the way. The novel's authenticity is enhanced by Dahl's painfully spot-on grievances about the deteriorating newspaper industry and her cogent observations about Brooklyn in both its post-millennium growth and its past lives--which somehow never seem all that far in the past.

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Starred review from February 15, 2017
Award-winning Dahl is a journalist specializing in crime and criminal justice. This is her third Rebekah Roberts novel (after Run You Down, 2015). Feeling stifled in her job at New York City's sleaziest tabloid, Rebekah begins to investigate a possible wrongful conviction that has resulted in the imprisonment of a teenage boy for 22 years for the brutal murder of his family in the summer of 1992, a year after the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn between black and Jewish neighbors. In answer to why she writes about things most people would rather not think about, Dahl says, Crime is what we call the evil we do to each other. This evil must be witnessed, and it must be chronicled. Conviction is a compelling, cleverly named chronicle in which Rebekah holds herself to an extraordinarily high standard of ethical behavior. She takes on community and religious leaders, the NYPD, a very popular female prosecutor, and her own mother to find justice for DeShawn Perkins. Dahl, too, holds herself to an exacting standard in constructing a carefully wrought narrative. The inclusion of historical malfeasance, including the Central Park Five, lends veracity to a tale that has at its heart the very meaning of power and poverty, justice, family, and, best of all, hope. Timely and perfect for twenty- and thirtysomething fans of Megan Abbott and Lisa Lutz.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)