The Ruins A Novel

An Oprah Daily Best Thriller of 2025

On a fall night in 1954, in working-class Lindenhurst, Long Island, a woman goes alone to a bar filled with German speakers who've finished their shifts at different jobs--some at a groundbreaking new project run by a man named Leavitt. They are gathered to listen to the first game of the World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians at the Polo Grounds. The game would make the history books because of "The Catch" at the outfield wall by Willie Mays.

But Lindenhurst's new chief of police, Paul Beirne, can't think about baseball. Still struggling with the demons from his time as a POW in Japan during the war, he gets the call that a woman's mutilated body is found in a field north of Lindenhurst, near where a new cemetery is being constructed to accommodate the growing suburbs. There hasn't been a murder in the village in decades, and on top of this horrific crime, there is a suspicious accident on the railroad tracks.

Paul turns to his friend Doc, a Holocaust survivor and who, like Paul, suffers from the horrors of his past. But Paul has personal horrors, too, that are outside the purview of war. Or so he thinks. In stark contrast to the whitewashed ideal Leavitt and others in Lindenhurst are trying to create, an evil as taken root in Lindenhurst. What Paul and Doc uncover will lead Paul to another murder, one committed two decades before, as past and present, family and world war, collide in this intense and thrilling debut from a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.