Southie Girl: Unpretentious, Endearing, Dangerous

Boston, Massachusetts...A hit-and-run driver runs down District Attorney Jason Miller on New Year’s Eve, 1995, as he carries his take-out dinner across the street. An exhaustive police investigation yields no suspects, and the case grows cold.

Assistant District Attorney Matthew Brooks moves into the district attorney’s position after Miller’s death, and a year later, announces his run for governor of Massachusetts. The older, wealthy, former criminal defense attorney invites a tall, attractive, charismatic young woman from working-class South Boston to run as his lieutenant governor. Dubbed Southie Girl by the media, Brooke Sullivan is the perfect match, and ’Brooks and Brooke, ’ win their elections.

But the Brooks and Brooke partnership is not serendipitous. It is part of twenty-seven-year-old Brooke Sullivan’s plan to destroy Matthew Brooks. After scheming and plotting to see him in the governor’s office, she has manipulated her way into Governor Brooks’s life, waiting for the day she exposes him for abandoning her pregnant mother decades before. In her words, ＂The bigger they are, the harder they fall.＂

Brooke is not deterred when her drive for revenge fractures her relationship with Molly Sullivan, the Irish immigrant grandmother who raised her in the first floor flat of her three-decker home in South Boston. And she continues to plot the fall from grace of Governor Matthew Brooks even when her husband, Chris Stathis, leaves her and moves into his parents’ summer home.

Chris takes a leave of absence from his job with Court TV as a trial reporter to contemplate his future without Brooke. Still haunted by the murder of his friend and colleague, District Attorney Jason Miller, he decides to write a book about his life and death, but first he must find Miller’s killer. Chris focuses on Governor Matthew Brooks, his wife’s biological father, who most benefitted by Jason Miller’s death. He reasons the same man who abandoned a woman pregnant with his child might also kill for political gain.

Chris spends months reviewing police reports, following leads, and conducting interviews, only to realize he’s been on a fool’s errand expecting to find the killer who eluded the Boston Police Homicide Unit. As he’s about to give up on the dream of writing a book about Jason Miller’s life and death, one whispered admission triggers a cascade of betrayals, confessions, and testimonies, providing Chris with his novel’s cast of characters, the Southie Girl among them.