Queer Justice

Charns has spent forty-three years chasing FBI files, and it shows — not in dry exposition but in the texture of the world he builds. The Hoover-Tolson office scenes, with the bronze eagle "seeking prey" and Miss Gandy as "sphinxlike" gatekeeper, feel lived-in because they're built from documentary bone. The Supreme Court conference room — "Eighteen ears, sixteen of whom would honor their judicial oath" — is a genuinely good image, and the granular procedural detail (recusals, cert strategy, the actual Fortas dissent text on deportation and "deviate homosexuality") gives the book an authority most historical fiction about institutions never earns. Puck's Hamtramck Catholicism, rosary beads skipped past the crucifix, the Black Madonna "bleeding from three long gashes," and the D.C. Jail's "waterless aquarium like cage" all root the reader in a specific, corroded mid-60s Washington.

This is also, straightforwardly, a high-concept premise executed with commercial instinct: a real unresolved historical allegation (Fortas/FBI blackmail), a closeted power structure (Hoover, Tolson, DeLoach), and a scrappy underdog defense team. That's a hook — the title alone does work. The book knows its lane and leans into procedural detail (voir dire rules, peremptory strikes, hearsay objections) that will satisfy readers who want the mechanics of the era's injustice made concrete, not abstract.

Where it falls short: prose is frequently expository rather than dramatized ("He was 5'2' and Jackie Kennedyesque"), and dialogue often functions as information delivery rather than voice differentiation — Hoover and Tolson, DeLoach and Fortas, blur together in cadence even as the historical content differs. Emotional beats (Smith's assault, his conversion) are rushed past rather than earned. But the research-built world is the real spine here, and it holds.