The Girl Who Wore a Hockey Helmet

Star Gwiazda is the real engine here — a public defender narrator who laughs at her judge's death, notes with black humor that she's 'the designated sex defender,' and processes her own arrest through hallucinated dinners with dead parents in Hamtramck. That reverie — Vernors ginger ale, czarnina, the Ambassador Bridge — isn't padding; it's the psychological core of a bipolar narrator using memory as armor, the same function as the titular hockey helmet her father gave her ('he said it was magic and when I wore it nothing could hurt me'). Charns earns the emotional stakes of that object by returning to it exactly when Star needs it — burning Zenko's letter, then reaching for the helmet before sleep.

The supporting cast is drawn with quick, specific strokes rather than types: Mozella in her 'don't fuck with me' pinstripe suit, the Flea popping up on his tiptoes at the cell door slit, Dixie Donner's strawberry beehive vanishing behind a filing cabinet, MaeSue's wordless competence as she inventories Star's purse. Even minor players get one telling detail — Tommy Durham's ZZ Top beard and turquoise belt buckle, Judge Ho's mispronunciation of 'Gweezda' as a small daily cruelty. This is a writer who knows courthouse culture from the inside (the author's own legal background shows), and it gives the book's world — Randleman County's racial fault lines, the Lumbee history, the corrupt magistrate's office — a lived-in density that never feels like research dumped on the page.

The near-assault by 'Mustache' in the cell is genuinely tense without tipping into gratuitousness, and it lands because we already know Star well enough to feel her calculation ('Don't look him in the eyes... say as little as possible') as character, not just plot mechanics.