Trell

Trell 

By Dick Lehr

Released Tuesday, September 12, 2017

On a hot summer night in the late 1980s, in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, a twelve-year-old African-American girl was sitting on a mailbox talking with her friends when she became the innocent victim of gang-related gunfire. Amid public outcry, an immediate manhunt was on to catch the murderer, and a young African-American man was quickly apprehended, charged, and — wrongly — convicted of the crime. Dick Lehr, a former reporter for the Boston Globe’s famous Spotlight Team who investigated this case for the newspaper, now turns the story into Trell, a page-turning novel about the daughter of an imprisoned man who persuades a reporter and a lawyer to help her prove her father’s innocence. What pieces of evidence might have been overlooked? Can they manage to get to the truth before a dangerous character from the neighborhood gets to them?

Dick Lehr is a well-known Boston-based reporter and the author of numerous nonfiction books for adults. Most notably, he is the co-author of a book on the mafia crime boss Whitey Bulger, Black Mass, which was made into a film starring Johnny Depp. Lehr, now a professor of journalism at Boston University, was previously a reporter for the Boston Globe and a member of the paper’s famous Spotlight Team. Trell is his first book for young adults.