"Wrenching political novel that asks how long grieving parents can be ignored." — booklife

Powered by deep frustration at political inaction, this harrowing, high-concept novel from Chiocchi (author of Time Framed) opens with a kidnapping that will scramble readers’ sense of justice. In Washington, D.C., after another profitable day of ignoring the protests of parents who have lost their children to gun violence, Speaker of the House Fred Grantham is seized by two armed men. The Brushy Ridge Militia is set in the aftermath of an unthinkable—but all-too-familiar—tragedy: in the fictional Ohio town of Brushy Ridge, a shooter kills eleven students and a teacher, a nightmare described not in grisly detail, but with enough emotional honesty to leave the reader gutted. Soon, the parents of Brushy Ridge, calling for gun reforms, face politicians who say things like, “I wish there was something I could say, Mr. Kovacs, but it’s a very complex issue.”

Chiocchi honors the reality of school shootings and the wrenching sense of loss that follows by offering, in the opening chapters, richly sketched portraits of Brushy Ridge teens, their inner lives pulsating with urgency. But the novel belongs to the parents, whose grief is white-hot and unrelenting—they fumble, lash out, contradict themselves, and feel real, which makes their eventual vigilantism, led by Hank Patrick, all the more unsettling—and compelling. After exhausting their options, they form a legally defined “militia” and kidnap Grantham. Their goal: to force him to confront the carnage he’s chosen to ignore.

Chiocchi plays with pacing and structure in a way that demands readers keep up, though the tonal shifts—between courtroom drama, psychological breakdown, media circus, and empathetic accounts of inner lives—always have an urgent emotional logic, mirroring the pained chaos of national discourse around gun violence. The novel’s second half is procedural: FBI negotiations, constitutional debates, and an escalating legal battle that goes to the top. Readers expecting tidy resolutions won’t find them here. Instead, Patrick’s actions challenge the reader to ask: when the law fails to protect your children, what recourse do you have?

Takeaway: Wrenching political novel that asks how long grieving parents can be ignored.