The Ruins: A Novel

In this gripping and electric novel, the grim horrors of Nazis in America collides with the manufacturing of the suburban dream—by a brilliant new voice in crime fiction.

An Oprah Daily Best Thriller of 2025

On a fall night in 1954, in working-class Lindenhurst, Long Island, a woman goes alone to a bar filled with German speakers who’ve finished their shifts at different jobs—some at a groundbreaking new project run by a man named Leavitt. They are gathered to listen to the first game of the World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians at the Polo Grounds. The game would make the history books because of “The Catch” at the outfield wall by Willie Mays.

But Lindenhurst's new chief of police, Paul Beirne, can't think about baseball. Still struggling with the demons from his time as a POW in Japan during the war, he gets the call that a woman's mutilated body is found in a field north of Lindenhurst, near where a new cemetery is being constructed to accommodate the growing suburbs. There hasn’t been a murder in the village in decades, and on top of this horrific crime, there is a suspicious accident on the railroad tracks.

Paul turns to his friend Doc, a Holocaust survivor and who, like Paul, suffers from the horrors of his past. But Paul has personal horrors, too, that are outside the purview of war. Or so he thinks. In stark contrast to the whitewashed ideal Leavitt and others in Lindenhurst are trying to create, an evil as taken root in Lindenhurst. What Paul and Doc uncover will lead Paul to another murder, one committed two decades before, as past and present, family and world war, collide in this intense and thrilling debut from a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.

Steve Wick is a Long Island journalist and the author of three non-fiction books, including The Long Night, about the journalist William L. Shirer. He has won dozens of reporting and writing awards and shared in Newsday’s Pulitzer Prize for Spot News reporting for the newspaper’s coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800.

ISBN: 9781639368150
Format: Hardback
Pages: 320
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: February 04, 2025

"Wick's debut novel has potent themes: baseball, Nazis, PTSD, and the suburban construction boom of the 1950s. Lindenhurst, New York's Police Chief Paul Beirne is haunted by memories of World War II when he was held in a Japanese POW camp. When a mutilated body is discovered in the Long Island town, Beirne senses that evil is thriving as the suburbs sprawl. Wick is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, and Long Island is his beat. In The Ruins, the reader is in expert hands.""After four nonfiction books and a career in journalism, Steve Wick has turned to fiction. His interests in Long Island history and World War II remain at center stage in The Ruins. Wick has built his narrative around a core of carefully researched real events, particularly the Lindbergh kidnapping, and the theory that not only was the executed man innocent, but that Lindbergh himself participated in the scheme." "Veteran journalist Wick’s first novel uses a horrific murder in a quiet Long Island village to rip the lid off a series of outrages, fictional and not, in the past. Readers will appreciate Wick’s explosive plotting and extensive historical research. A shattering journey from Lindenhurst to Lindbergh."“In the debut novel from biographer Wick (The Long Night), former POW Paul Beirne unearths an insidious conspiracy on Long Island. The action in The Ruins brims with fascinating insight about the Nazis’ presence in the U.S. and the shifting cultural climate of the 1950s.”"Veteran investigative reporter Steve Wick's fiction debut explodes with ripped from recent headlines about icons and ignored American history that will blow your mind. This multi-leveled, multi-generational crime and espionage story keeps readers guessing right up until the final pages and leaves them with fresh questions about how we all got here."Praise for Steve Wick

“It's this Shirer—the human being, a man of determination and steely nerve—that Mr. Wick gets onto the pages of his book."“The Long Night is indeed an adventure story. A fast-paced narrative drive. But Mr. Wick has documented the story with scrupulous attention to detail.” “Wick offers an absorbing and very detailed account, the perfect companion piece to Shirer's masterwork.”

"Wick knows how to tell a good story."“Thorough, fast-paced, and absorbing.”