What Dennis Lehane did for Boston with books such as Mystic River and Small Mercies and Don Winslow did for Providence with his Danny Ryan trilogy, Ron Currie does for Waterville, Maine, with this equally stunning saga of a community mired in drugs and despair.
At its center is the titular Barbara “Babs” Dionne, who is the drug-dealing queen of a depressed Franco-American section of Waterville called Little Canada. Her ancestors came from France to Quebec in the 1600s and have suffered discrimination ever since. Assimilation would have made life easier for French-speaking Babs and her forebears, but fitting in wasn’t for them. When she was 14, Babs killed a cop who raped her, and she was stashed in a convent for her safety. Emerging five years later, she got married, had children, and now runs the community’s drug trade.
Tough as old boots, and an absolute control freak, Babs is feeling pressure from all sides. Her daughter Lori, an Afghanistan vet who self-medicates indiscriminately for her PTSD, is becoming unreliable. Her other daughter, also an addict, is missing, and a nephew spinning out of control needs to be dealt with.
Perhaps most concerning is the ominous appearance of “The Man,” a preternaturally calm and scary Canadian Ken doll who’s demanding that Babs turn control of her business over to his mysterious boss.
Babs sees her operation as a service to the neighborhood: if they’re doing drugs anyway, they might as well get their stuff from her since she can decide whom she sells to and the quality of her product. She won’t cooperate with the Man, even if refusal guarantees scorched earth for her and her crew of neighbor-lady gangsters.
This book is an electrifying achievement by Currie, epic in its ambition but intimate in its focus, and nearly flawless in execution. He takes on a variety of prickly issues—a “rural ghetto” seemingly doomed to crumble, the toll of the drug trade and its attendant violence, families stuck in a cycle of failure—and faces them head-on.
Here’s Babs explaining to a party-line progressive that prejudice takes many forms: “I ask you, please, to stop being so certain of what I am and am not, what I have and have not endured. If you look at me and see a white woman, that’s your mistake. Whatever sins go along with being white, don’t pin them on me—I’ve been running from white people my whole life.”
It’s also shot through with dark humor; wisecracking, along with chain-smoking and drinking jugs of Carlo Rossi’s finest, is how Babs and her ladies have survived this long. But the real hope for the future lies with fierce, damaged Lori, who gives the book its steely spine. It’s only April, but it’s safe to say that this will hold up as one of the best crime-fiction books of 2025.
While I’m at it, let me add Netflix’s Adolescence to my premature best-of list. There’s already been a lot of conversation and debate around this show, created by Jack Thorne and one of its stars, Stephen Graham, and directed by Philip Barantini. The boldness of its title sets up major expectations, which are surpassed in its tight four episodes.
The premise is shocking: a 13-year-old boy named Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) is accused of murdering a female classmate. She’s been stabbed multiple times with a kitchen knife, a very personal crime, and, this being England, the assault has been captured on a surveillance camera.
What follows is a lapidary, unsparing examination of the causes and effects of the killing on the boy, his family, his school, and the police officers, lawyers, and psychologists tasked with his care after his arrest. All four episodes were shot in one continuous take, which makes for an intimacy and rawness that’s rare in television.
The first takes us step-by-step through Jamie’s arrest and painstakingly correct processing, and the second follows two detectives as they awkwardly try to gather information at his school, where they learn that Jamie was bullied by the victim on social media for being an incel loser. This news flash comes from a detective’s son, the only student who will talk to them.
The third episode is the best television I’ve seen in forever, as psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty) sits down alone with Jamie to assess him, attempting with all of her considerable skill and delicacy to get him to reveal himself. Jamie, who is both cleverer and less mature than most boys his age, banters with Briony and parries her advances about everything from sandwich fillings to the meaning of masculinity, until she strikes a nerve. This happens more than once, until finally he crosses the line. Once Jamie is gone, a shaken Briony goes to throw his half-eaten sandwich away and pulls her hand back as if it’s radioactive. She’s not there to clean up his mess; it’s time for him to do that himself.
Doherty, who stole her scenes in The Crown as a tart Princess Anne, and the remarkable first-time actor Cooper, are mesmerizing in the acting equivalent of Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. Neither actor puts a foot wrong.
Episode Four takes place 13 months after the murder, on Eddie Miller’s (Graham) 50th birthday, as he and his wife (Christine Tremarco) and daughter try fruitlessly to make it a festive day. Graham and Tremarco are heartbreaking as well-intentioned but not especially introspective parents trying to reckon with their role in the tragedy that’s blown up their lives.
There was a piece in the London Telegraph complaining that this show demonizes teenage boys, but I disagree. Adolescence tries, with the greatest sensitivity, to understand the vulnerability of young men and boys to this insidious manosphere crap. Yes, it explores the wreckage Jamie leaves behind, but it’s worth noting that there’s no episode devoted to his victim’s family, which would have really stacked the deck against him. This is about recognizing that the problem does not lie squarely with the kids and trying to do better for them.
For those feeling a bit crushed after Adolescence, Ludwig is here to lift your spirits. Which is strange, since Ludwig himself—the nom de plume of puzzle-master extraordinaire John Taylor (David Mitchell)—seldom leaves his house and takes social awkwardness to new heights when he does. Yet he’s comfortable with this life until his sister-in-law Lucy (a chipper Anna Maxwell Martin) informs him that his twin brother, a police detective in Cambridge, has disappeared.
She asks John if he could impersonate James at police headquarters to gather information that might lead her to her husband’s whereabouts. John reluctantly agrees, wearing contact lenses that give him a wide-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights look and doing battle with seat belts and parking spaces. If you’ve seen Mitchell in Peep Show, you get the idea; there’s a newly hatched bewilderment to his encounters with the modern world that’s quite endearing.
To John’s dismay, James’s colleagues really do think he’s his brother, and when a murder case comes up, he has to play detective. Of course, he manages to solve the murder in no time, using well-honed logic and process of elimination. It’s the show’s running joke that each time John dazzles the assembled colleagues and suspects with his elegant solutions, the awestruck killer confesses.
Enhancing the proceedings is an inventive score that reworks themes from Beethoven, Ludwig’s namesake, and keeps things moving. The series’s darker through line is the search for James, which advances fitfully as the season goes on. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that we know he’s alive by the series’s end. The show has been such a hit in England that two more seasons are on the way—they should provide a charming respite from our increasingly dystopian media diet.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mysteries for Air Mail. She lives in New York City
