Favorite Sons
A Novel
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Narrator of Favorite Sons Hutch Van Buren is fifteen years old, playing sports and searching for arrowheads in a small industrial town in Ohio with his three closest friends when an altercation between the comrades and Petey Sanchez, a troubled seventeen- year-old, leads to Petey’s accidental death. Together, Hutch and his friends become ensnared in a web of secrets and moral dilemmas. A local ne’er-do-well goes to jail for the crime while the boys keep their pact of silence. Each boy shoulders the burden of truth in his own way as each attempts to leave the past behind.
Thirty-three years later, in 2004, Van Buren is the prosecuting attorney in Summit County, Ohio, and a candidate for state attorney general when he learns that he and his boyhood friends weren’t the only ones keeping a secret about Petey’s death. A convicted sex offender in need of a favor attempts to blackmail Van Buren in return for his silence. Van Buren must decide between his political career and the duty of the office he has sworn to uphold. With the clock ticking, Van Buren has a week to seek out his boyhood friends and search his soul while he sorts out three decades of deceit he helped create.
Favorite Sons is a wonderful, suspenseful novel with nuanced, memorable characters and unpredictable plot twists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The shadow of a youthful mistake hovers over an ambitious prosecutor in this middling first novel from former crime reporter Yocum (Dead Before Deadline). In 1971, in the small Ohio town of Crystalton, 15-year-old Hutchinson Van Buren and a group of friends encounter violent, developmentally disabled 17-year-old Petey Sanchez. When Sanchez attacks one of them, Adrian Nash, with a tree branch, Nash lashes out with a maul, killing his assailant. The boys panic and flee the scene, scared of the repercussions if they tell the authorities the truth. The ethical implications of their silence become even trickier when a convicted child molester is charged with the murder. Most of the book is set in 2004, when Van Buren, the chief prosecutor for Summit County, is running for state attorney general and is confronted with a blackmailer who knows the truth about Sanchez's death. Van Buren isn't a distinctive enough lead to make readers care much whether he prevails or not.
