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Good Guys
Not yet published
Expected 13 Oct 26In a small New England town in 2008, two estranged sisters become embroiled in a war crime involving a local hero …
Georgie and Jo are sisters, but they aren’t close. The situation seems worse once Jo goes off to college, making it obvious she’s happy about leaving Curtisville and Georgie and their disabled father behind.
Then, Gary Clemmons dies in the Iraq War. Gary—the son of their pastor, the hero of their hometown, and the brother of Georgie’s secret girlfriend—was famous for being a good guy.
But Georgie stumbles on a dark secret about Gary, and once Jo finds out, things begin to spiral out of control. The fallout will change both sister’s lives forever.
In the end, Good Guys uncovers the underbelly of a small town—the darkness of patriotism and masculinity, the harm caused by blind religious fervor, and the ways these dynamics can destroy families.
Georgie and Jo are sisters, but they aren’t close. The situation seems worse once Jo goes off to college, making it obvious she’s happy about leaving Curtisville and Georgie and their disabled father behind.
Then, Gary Clemmons dies in the Iraq War. Gary—the son of their pastor, the hero of their hometown, and the brother of Georgie’s secret girlfriend—was famous for being a good guy.
But Georgie stumbles on a dark secret about Gary, and once Jo finds out, things begin to spiral out of control. The fallout will change both sister’s lives forever.
In the end, Good Guys uncovers the underbelly of a small town—the darkness of patriotism and masculinity, the harm caused by blind religious fervor, and the ways these dynamics can destroy families.
- GenresFiction
320 pages, Paperback
Expected publication October 13, 2026
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
You Don’t Get to Play the Good Guy
Mindy Misener’s “Good Guys” keeps score until the score stops helping, turning sisterly grievance, journalistic certainty, caregiving, and one impossible moat into a novel about the limits of moral bookkeeping.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | October 4th, 2026
Doubt enters Mindy Misener’s “Good Guys” through objects that look reassuringly solid: a camera, a pill bottle, an article, an obituary, a disc somebody kept in a cardboard box. Each appears to promise an answer. None quite does. A photograph shows that an atrocity occurred and says nothing certain about why its photographer made the image. A sister can fail you when you most need her and still have spent years loving you in ways you refused to count. Misener’s subject is not simply moral ambiguity, that roomy phrase into which criticism can stuff almost anything. It is what happens after a trace of an event gets promoted into a complete account of motive, character, guilt, innocence, even love.
Early on, estranged sisters Jo and Georgie Prescott have learned opposite ways of living with what they cannot settle. Jo leaves their small Maine town for Peabody College and wants badly to become a journalist. Georgie stays near home, works at Pine Creek Senior Living Center, cares for their disabled father, and dates Tara Clemmens. Tara’s brother Gary, the charismatic son of their former pastor and Jo’s onetime secret sexual partner, is killed in Iraq. Curtisville turns him into a hometown hero. Then photographs emerge of mutilated Iraqi bodies, including evidence that men in Gary’s unit treated human remains as trophies. Gary’s camera is one of the things he leaves behind.
Misener could have made Jo’s history with Gary a shortcut to vindication. Instead it makes her reporting more dangerous. Gary sexually pressured her when she was young; in a motel room, she tried to withdraw and he treated her refusal as something negotiable. Years later, Jo has every reason to distrust him before she sees a single photograph from Iraq. What happened in that motel is not made less true by what she later gets wrong. Nor does the motel give her special access to Gary’s motives thousands of miles away. Jo can know one terrible thing about him and still claim too much from another set of facts. The two truths sit together badly. Misener leaves them there.
Evidence stops being professionally exciting when Jo secretly downloads Gary’s photographs and, almost as an afterthought, looks at them. “Then I made the mistake of looking at the photos,” she thinks. The theft has already happened. Looking is what Jo calls the mistake, because looking interrupts usefulness. Until then she has wanted confirmation that she possesses the story her professor thinks she has. Then a dead Iraqi boy fills the screen. Misener’s prose contracts: “This was real. This boy was someone’s kid. This boy was someone’s friend.” Jo normally thinks through qualifications, comparisons, revisions; here the sentences go blunt. “This boy” repeats like a hand touching the same fact twice to make sure it is there. “Kid” and “friend” pull a body back toward relation. Then Jo’s usual syntax returns. Using his death for professional advantage is wrong. But wouldn’t allowing the photographs to remain secret be wrong too? She has seen enough to become ashamed of her motives, not enough to know what she ought to do. She keeps going.
The two sisters sound different partly because they hesitate differently. Jo edits herself before anyone else gets the chance: a conclusion, its objection, then a qualification to the objection. Georgie moves more by association: a bodily sensation, a memory, the mood of the person beside her, the practical problem at hand. Misener’s sentences are usually clear and medium-length, more interested in the motion of thought than display. Jo can hear almost every counterargument. Hearing one does not mean obeying it. Intelligence does not necessarily prevent self-deception. Sometimes it merely improves the brief.
Roommate life gives Jo one of her funniest tells: she is bothered by a dorm bathroom sign whose categories lack parallel structure. The joke is tiny and diagnostic. She wants forms to behave. She wants rules to reveal themselves. At Peabody, where classmates possess money, internships, family connections, and the ease of people who do not have to calculate the emotional price of accepting a favor, she keeps searching for the hidden syntax of advancement. Her hunger for the Gary story is therefore not mere vanity. She gets her chance partly because she is talented and partly because a classmate can introduce her to an editor. Misener understands how meritocracy feels from the scholarship seat: you work furiously, notice the side doors opening for other people, and become reluctant to refuse the one that finally cracks for you.
If Jo presses uncertainty until it resembles an answer, Georgie can use uncertainty to avoid arriving anywhere at all. “What do I know?” is almost a refrain. Sometimes it is humility. Sometimes it is upholstered avoidance. Georgie understands bodies and immediate need better than Jo does; she is genuinely gifted at elder care. When their father’s chronic pain hardens into opioid dependence, however, her wish to relieve suffering slides into illicitly obtaining medication. When Tara hesitates over Gary’s photographs, Georgie decides that perhaps Tara needs somebody else to do what she cannot bring herself to do. Georgie does not secretly crave authority. That is what makes the problem interesting. She can substitute her judgment for another person’s while still feeling like the person in the room least interested in judging anyone.
Pattern matters here. Twenty chapters divide evenly between the sisters and alternate without exception: Jo, Georgie, Jo, Georgie. Neither keeps control of the account for long. Jo remembers abandonment; Georgie remembers years of caretaking. Jo experiences leaving Curtisville as survival; Georgie experiences staying as responsibility. Their versions overlap without fitting neatly together. Ten chapters apiece does not make their mistakes equivalent. It does something narrower: whenever one sister appears to have explained the other, the other gets the page.
At the beginning, Jo already knows what she believes Georgie owed her. After Georgie eventually retrieves her from a convenience store following the motel episode with Gary, Jo remembers being held still while Georgie removed a splinter from her palm. Tweezers. Warm hands. A grip too strong to escape. What Jo wanted then, and still wants, is contained in one line: “Help was temporary. Holding on was forever.” Years later Georgie can point to Dad, work, practical sacrifices, all the ways she remained available while Jo left. None is imaginary. None reaches backward and repairs the night Jo called. Care is not retroactive editing.
Pressed together in a computer lab, the sisters finally fight about how far Jo plans to take the Gary story. Georgie arrives wanting mercy and, within minutes, wants to be right. Jo reaches backward to the call from the motel; Georgie mentally races through everything she has done since. Then Jo says, “You don’t get to play the good guy.” The sentence would be trivial if Georgie had never been good to anybody. Its force comes from the opposite fact. She has cared, repeatedly and materially. Jo refuses only the conversion of those years into immunity, the idea that one can hand over enough later kindnesses to have an earlier failure marked paid.
And Jo keeps books of her own. After discovering that Georgie has obtained controlled medication for their father, she thinks: “Her crimes. My errors were, technically, professional.” “Technically” should be entered into evidence against her. Jo has built an identity around detecting euphemism and hears none in her own sentence. Georgie gets the criminal drawer; Jo prefers the adjacent one marked Career Mistake. The comedy is inseparable from the self-deception. Jo is not failing to think. She is thinking very hard in the direction she needs the answer to go. Her intelligence has become an advocacy service retained by her pride.
Dad makes both sisters’ theories of care harder to maintain. He loves them, and he has allowed Georgie to shoulder responsibilities that should never have remained a family problem. His back injury, medical debt, dependence on OxyContin, repeated attempts to taper, and eventual withdrawal make “helping” feel different depending on the hour. In 2002, six years before the book’s main action, the Maine Office of Substance Abuse was already calling OxyContin abuse “Maine’s Newest Epidemic.” Georgie is not stumbling into a disaster history has yet to name. She is living inside one already publicly recognizable while her household still treats it as private misfortune.
Images from Iraq had acquired a similar public instability by 2008. Errol Morris’s “Standard Operating Procedure,” released in the year in which the novel is set, examined the photographs from Abu Ghraib by worrying at what they showed, what lay beyond their frames, and how easily the most visible people could absorb blame belonging to a larger apparatus. “Good Guys” is not a fictionalization of Abu Ghraib, but Gary’s camera sits inside that visual history. Jo does not fall for a fake. She looks at an accurate image of genuine atrocity and asks it to supply motive, sequence, and character. The photograph tells the truth. It does not tell all of it.
Misener lets another journalist, Justin Kramer, discover how much Jo has asked the pictures to do. He re-reports her piece, establishes that she stole them, and finds evidence pointing more strongly toward Staff Sergeant Thomas Gadson. Gary may have participated in the crimes. He may have been collecting evidence against Gadson. He may have had uglier reasons for keeping the images. Kramer’s article wrecks Jo’s reputation but does not produce Gary’s innocence. The crimes remain; what changes is the distribution of confidence around them. Tara eventually reaches a position Jo could not hold: she would like to believe her brother meant to do right, but she cannot say that he did. Desire is admitted into the room without being allowed to testify as fact.
It would be easy to mistake this for a novel that simply distrusts judgment. It does not. Gary pressured Jo. Jo stole Tara’s photographs. Georgie obtained drugs illegally. Men in Gary’s unit abused Iraqi bodies. Those statements do not dissolve when motives become murky. What changes is their reach. Knowing an action does not necessarily mean knowing everything that produced it; knowing a motive does not erase an effect. The dangerous step is the extra one, often taken almost invisibly, in which “he did this” becomes “this is what he was.”
The old religious vocabulary keeps hovering around that extra step. Tara once wrote that the absolute love of Jesus was all she wanted to know and share; later she cannot figure out how to “graft” that faith onto her life. Georgie sheds much of the doctrine while retaining habits of purpose and service. Jo leaves church and eventually finds herself almost praying without being sure there is anyone listening. Pastor Mark needs Gary’s life to resolve into providence. The characters stop knowing exactly what they believe long before they stop using the moral grammar belief gave them. Certainty leaves. The verbs remain: forgive, judge, serve, confess, love.
Rather than disappearing into ambiguity, the book occasionally arranges it too neatly. Jo steals evidence and overstates what it proves; Georgie obtains opioids and overstates what helping Dad permits. Jo’s imagined future in journalism collapses; Georgie’s identity as a caregiver becomes untenable. Just when either might occupy the moral high ground, the plot supplies a transgression that knocks her off it. The parallel clarifies the sisters, but its timing can feel composed rather than discovered. A novel suspicious of moral bookkeeping sometimes balances its own accounts with suspicious efficiency.
One difficulty is harder to admire away. The dead Iraqi boy becomes fully visible to Jo at exactly the moment the novel needs her ambition to become morally repellent. “Someone’s kid,” “someone’s friend” restores him from object to relation, but only briefly, and only through relationships Jo can imagine. He remains unnamed. We never learn enough about him to resist the uses the American characters make of his death. He clarifies Jo, destabilizes Gary, enlarges Tara’s grief, and raises the stakes of the journalism plot. Some of that distance follows from the novel’s chosen points of view. Still, “Good Guys” knows better than most novels how violent it can be to make another person useful to your story. Its most distant victim is also the person it cannot entirely stop using.
Perhaps that is why Georgie’s uncertainty cannot simply become the ethical alternative. “What do I know?” can be modesty; it can also leave a problem sitting in the room until somebody else pays for the delay. Tara eventually reports the photographs. Dad’s addiction has to be named. Jo’s article is badly reported, but it helps direct attention toward crimes that actually occurred. Waiting for perfect information would have been another choice, not the absence of one. “Good Guys” is strongest in this bind: act too soon and knowledge may fail you; wait too long and somebody may be harmed while you congratulate yourself on being nuanced.
One late scene stages that bind almost mischievously. Jo finds a pill bottle bearing the name of a dead Pine Creek resident and drives to Georgie’s workplace ready to confront her. She has evidence. She has an accusation. Before she reaches her sister, several residents recognize Jo immediately. Georgie talks about her all the time. Georgie is proud of her. The pill bottle remains evidence of wrongdoing. The residents are evidence of love. Neither cancels the other, and the order matters: Jo has to receive the second fact before she can prosecute the first. For once, contrary evidence reaches her before the verdict.
Under Dad’s roof survives another sort of record. In a box containing Jo’s childhood awards and a mostly blank baby book, she finds four episodes of “Good Guys,” the failed sitcom their absent mother once wrote for. Four husbands have disappointed their wives in various ways, but the comic machinery keeps them lovable enough that forgiveness has been built into the premise. Genre supplies acquittal in advance. Jo wants to write a paper demolishing the show, which is funny until one remembers that she too has acquired a searchable record from which strangers can build an entire person. The question of how much one episode gets to mean is no longer theoretical.
Late in the book, Jo begins to live among things that are less easily entered into a record. She leaves Peabody and drifts toward substitute teaching, a future her earlier self might have regarded as documentary proof that she failed. Misener does not reward her wrongdoing by teaching her to stop being ambitious, nor does the novel present a classroom as moral penance. Jo discovers instead that knowing the worst private fact about a student can make hatred harder. Friendship with Lily resumes without requiring Jo to become innocent first. Prayer returns almost accidentally. Her future is no longer the one she planned, but “unplanned” gradually ceases to sound like a verdict.
On Higgins Beach, years earlier, Georgie once persuaded Jo to build a moat against the incoming tide while their mother sat nearby, technically present and otherwise elsewhere. Misener first calls the activity a game, then removes the premise that makes a game a game: there is “no chance at winning.” What follows is work. Dig. Scoop. Heave. Bail. Jo becomes absorbed because there is a task; Georgie matches her effort. The grammar turns collective. They do not confess anything. They do not finally understand each other. They work beside each other until the ocean makes their plan ridiculous. That ending helps explain why “Good Guys” earns 88/100 and 4/5 stars from me. Its prose is exact rather than ostentatious, its alternating structure changes what each sister’s version can mean, and its best characterization refuses the convenience of choosing between sympathy and judgment. The too-neat parallels, thinner secondary figures, and burden placed on the Iraqi victim keep it below the exceptional range, but they are also part of why the book remains worth arguing with.
Still, when Jo and Georgie return to the beach at sunset, the sand is smooth. “No sign of our struggle remained.” This comes after photographs, articles, pill bottles, obituaries, journals, discs, and an internet record likely to outlast Jo’s shame. The absence of a trace does not make the moat a model for public truth; a war-crime accusation needs evidence strong enough to bear another person’s life. A childhood memory answers to a different standard because the two people in it were there. The tide wins. The moat is gone. What Georgie keeps is smaller than proof and, between sisters, perhaps more useful: each kept digging because the other had not stopped.
Mindy Misener’s “Good Guys” keeps score until the score stops helping, turning sisterly grievance, journalistic certainty, caregiving, and one impossible moat into a novel about the limits of moral bookkeeping.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | October 4th, 2026
Doubt enters Mindy Misener’s “Good Guys” through objects that look reassuringly solid: a camera, a pill bottle, an article, an obituary, a disc somebody kept in a cardboard box. Each appears to promise an answer. None quite does. A photograph shows that an atrocity occurred and says nothing certain about why its photographer made the image. A sister can fail you when you most need her and still have spent years loving you in ways you refused to count. Misener’s subject is not simply moral ambiguity, that roomy phrase into which criticism can stuff almost anything. It is what happens after a trace of an event gets promoted into a complete account of motive, character, guilt, innocence, even love.
Early on, estranged sisters Jo and Georgie Prescott have learned opposite ways of living with what they cannot settle. Jo leaves their small Maine town for Peabody College and wants badly to become a journalist. Georgie stays near home, works at Pine Creek Senior Living Center, cares for their disabled father, and dates Tara Clemmens. Tara’s brother Gary, the charismatic son of their former pastor and Jo’s onetime secret sexual partner, is killed in Iraq. Curtisville turns him into a hometown hero. Then photographs emerge of mutilated Iraqi bodies, including evidence that men in Gary’s unit treated human remains as trophies. Gary’s camera is one of the things he leaves behind.
Misener could have made Jo’s history with Gary a shortcut to vindication. Instead it makes her reporting more dangerous. Gary sexually pressured her when she was young; in a motel room, she tried to withdraw and he treated her refusal as something negotiable. Years later, Jo has every reason to distrust him before she sees a single photograph from Iraq. What happened in that motel is not made less true by what she later gets wrong. Nor does the motel give her special access to Gary’s motives thousands of miles away. Jo can know one terrible thing about him and still claim too much from another set of facts. The two truths sit together badly. Misener leaves them there.
Evidence stops being professionally exciting when Jo secretly downloads Gary’s photographs and, almost as an afterthought, looks at them. “Then I made the mistake of looking at the photos,” she thinks. The theft has already happened. Looking is what Jo calls the mistake, because looking interrupts usefulness. Until then she has wanted confirmation that she possesses the story her professor thinks she has. Then a dead Iraqi boy fills the screen. Misener’s prose contracts: “This was real. This boy was someone’s kid. This boy was someone’s friend.” Jo normally thinks through qualifications, comparisons, revisions; here the sentences go blunt. “This boy” repeats like a hand touching the same fact twice to make sure it is there. “Kid” and “friend” pull a body back toward relation. Then Jo’s usual syntax returns. Using his death for professional advantage is wrong. But wouldn’t allowing the photographs to remain secret be wrong too? She has seen enough to become ashamed of her motives, not enough to know what she ought to do. She keeps going.
The two sisters sound different partly because they hesitate differently. Jo edits herself before anyone else gets the chance: a conclusion, its objection, then a qualification to the objection. Georgie moves more by association: a bodily sensation, a memory, the mood of the person beside her, the practical problem at hand. Misener’s sentences are usually clear and medium-length, more interested in the motion of thought than display. Jo can hear almost every counterargument. Hearing one does not mean obeying it. Intelligence does not necessarily prevent self-deception. Sometimes it merely improves the brief.
Roommate life gives Jo one of her funniest tells: she is bothered by a dorm bathroom sign whose categories lack parallel structure. The joke is tiny and diagnostic. She wants forms to behave. She wants rules to reveal themselves. At Peabody, where classmates possess money, internships, family connections, and the ease of people who do not have to calculate the emotional price of accepting a favor, she keeps searching for the hidden syntax of advancement. Her hunger for the Gary story is therefore not mere vanity. She gets her chance partly because she is talented and partly because a classmate can introduce her to an editor. Misener understands how meritocracy feels from the scholarship seat: you work furiously, notice the side doors opening for other people, and become reluctant to refuse the one that finally cracks for you.
If Jo presses uncertainty until it resembles an answer, Georgie can use uncertainty to avoid arriving anywhere at all. “What do I know?” is almost a refrain. Sometimes it is humility. Sometimes it is upholstered avoidance. Georgie understands bodies and immediate need better than Jo does; she is genuinely gifted at elder care. When their father’s chronic pain hardens into opioid dependence, however, her wish to relieve suffering slides into illicitly obtaining medication. When Tara hesitates over Gary’s photographs, Georgie decides that perhaps Tara needs somebody else to do what she cannot bring herself to do. Georgie does not secretly crave authority. That is what makes the problem interesting. She can substitute her judgment for another person’s while still feeling like the person in the room least interested in judging anyone.
Pattern matters here. Twenty chapters divide evenly between the sisters and alternate without exception: Jo, Georgie, Jo, Georgie. Neither keeps control of the account for long. Jo remembers abandonment; Georgie remembers years of caretaking. Jo experiences leaving Curtisville as survival; Georgie experiences staying as responsibility. Their versions overlap without fitting neatly together. Ten chapters apiece does not make their mistakes equivalent. It does something narrower: whenever one sister appears to have explained the other, the other gets the page.
At the beginning, Jo already knows what she believes Georgie owed her. After Georgie eventually retrieves her from a convenience store following the motel episode with Gary, Jo remembers being held still while Georgie removed a splinter from her palm. Tweezers. Warm hands. A grip too strong to escape. What Jo wanted then, and still wants, is contained in one line: “Help was temporary. Holding on was forever.” Years later Georgie can point to Dad, work, practical sacrifices, all the ways she remained available while Jo left. None is imaginary. None reaches backward and repairs the night Jo called. Care is not retroactive editing.
Pressed together in a computer lab, the sisters finally fight about how far Jo plans to take the Gary story. Georgie arrives wanting mercy and, within minutes, wants to be right. Jo reaches backward to the call from the motel; Georgie mentally races through everything she has done since. Then Jo says, “You don’t get to play the good guy.” The sentence would be trivial if Georgie had never been good to anybody. Its force comes from the opposite fact. She has cared, repeatedly and materially. Jo refuses only the conversion of those years into immunity, the idea that one can hand over enough later kindnesses to have an earlier failure marked paid.
And Jo keeps books of her own. After discovering that Georgie has obtained controlled medication for their father, she thinks: “Her crimes. My errors were, technically, professional.” “Technically” should be entered into evidence against her. Jo has built an identity around detecting euphemism and hears none in her own sentence. Georgie gets the criminal drawer; Jo prefers the adjacent one marked Career Mistake. The comedy is inseparable from the self-deception. Jo is not failing to think. She is thinking very hard in the direction she needs the answer to go. Her intelligence has become an advocacy service retained by her pride.
Dad makes both sisters’ theories of care harder to maintain. He loves them, and he has allowed Georgie to shoulder responsibilities that should never have remained a family problem. His back injury, medical debt, dependence on OxyContin, repeated attempts to taper, and eventual withdrawal make “helping” feel different depending on the hour. In 2002, six years before the book’s main action, the Maine Office of Substance Abuse was already calling OxyContin abuse “Maine’s Newest Epidemic.” Georgie is not stumbling into a disaster history has yet to name. She is living inside one already publicly recognizable while her household still treats it as private misfortune.
Images from Iraq had acquired a similar public instability by 2008. Errol Morris’s “Standard Operating Procedure,” released in the year in which the novel is set, examined the photographs from Abu Ghraib by worrying at what they showed, what lay beyond their frames, and how easily the most visible people could absorb blame belonging to a larger apparatus. “Good Guys” is not a fictionalization of Abu Ghraib, but Gary’s camera sits inside that visual history. Jo does not fall for a fake. She looks at an accurate image of genuine atrocity and asks it to supply motive, sequence, and character. The photograph tells the truth. It does not tell all of it.
Misener lets another journalist, Justin Kramer, discover how much Jo has asked the pictures to do. He re-reports her piece, establishes that she stole them, and finds evidence pointing more strongly toward Staff Sergeant Thomas Gadson. Gary may have participated in the crimes. He may have been collecting evidence against Gadson. He may have had uglier reasons for keeping the images. Kramer’s article wrecks Jo’s reputation but does not produce Gary’s innocence. The crimes remain; what changes is the distribution of confidence around them. Tara eventually reaches a position Jo could not hold: she would like to believe her brother meant to do right, but she cannot say that he did. Desire is admitted into the room without being allowed to testify as fact.
It would be easy to mistake this for a novel that simply distrusts judgment. It does not. Gary pressured Jo. Jo stole Tara’s photographs. Georgie obtained drugs illegally. Men in Gary’s unit abused Iraqi bodies. Those statements do not dissolve when motives become murky. What changes is their reach. Knowing an action does not necessarily mean knowing everything that produced it; knowing a motive does not erase an effect. The dangerous step is the extra one, often taken almost invisibly, in which “he did this” becomes “this is what he was.”
The old religious vocabulary keeps hovering around that extra step. Tara once wrote that the absolute love of Jesus was all she wanted to know and share; later she cannot figure out how to “graft” that faith onto her life. Georgie sheds much of the doctrine while retaining habits of purpose and service. Jo leaves church and eventually finds herself almost praying without being sure there is anyone listening. Pastor Mark needs Gary’s life to resolve into providence. The characters stop knowing exactly what they believe long before they stop using the moral grammar belief gave them. Certainty leaves. The verbs remain: forgive, judge, serve, confess, love.
Rather than disappearing into ambiguity, the book occasionally arranges it too neatly. Jo steals evidence and overstates what it proves; Georgie obtains opioids and overstates what helping Dad permits. Jo’s imagined future in journalism collapses; Georgie’s identity as a caregiver becomes untenable. Just when either might occupy the moral high ground, the plot supplies a transgression that knocks her off it. The parallel clarifies the sisters, but its timing can feel composed rather than discovered. A novel suspicious of moral bookkeeping sometimes balances its own accounts with suspicious efficiency.
One difficulty is harder to admire away. The dead Iraqi boy becomes fully visible to Jo at exactly the moment the novel needs her ambition to become morally repellent. “Someone’s kid,” “someone’s friend” restores him from object to relation, but only briefly, and only through relationships Jo can imagine. He remains unnamed. We never learn enough about him to resist the uses the American characters make of his death. He clarifies Jo, destabilizes Gary, enlarges Tara’s grief, and raises the stakes of the journalism plot. Some of that distance follows from the novel’s chosen points of view. Still, “Good Guys” knows better than most novels how violent it can be to make another person useful to your story. Its most distant victim is also the person it cannot entirely stop using.
Perhaps that is why Georgie’s uncertainty cannot simply become the ethical alternative. “What do I know?” can be modesty; it can also leave a problem sitting in the room until somebody else pays for the delay. Tara eventually reports the photographs. Dad’s addiction has to be named. Jo’s article is badly reported, but it helps direct attention toward crimes that actually occurred. Waiting for perfect information would have been another choice, not the absence of one. “Good Guys” is strongest in this bind: act too soon and knowledge may fail you; wait too long and somebody may be harmed while you congratulate yourself on being nuanced.
One late scene stages that bind almost mischievously. Jo finds a pill bottle bearing the name of a dead Pine Creek resident and drives to Georgie’s workplace ready to confront her. She has evidence. She has an accusation. Before she reaches her sister, several residents recognize Jo immediately. Georgie talks about her all the time. Georgie is proud of her. The pill bottle remains evidence of wrongdoing. The residents are evidence of love. Neither cancels the other, and the order matters: Jo has to receive the second fact before she can prosecute the first. For once, contrary evidence reaches her before the verdict.
Under Dad’s roof survives another sort of record. In a box containing Jo’s childhood awards and a mostly blank baby book, she finds four episodes of “Good Guys,” the failed sitcom their absent mother once wrote for. Four husbands have disappointed their wives in various ways, but the comic machinery keeps them lovable enough that forgiveness has been built into the premise. Genre supplies acquittal in advance. Jo wants to write a paper demolishing the show, which is funny until one remembers that she too has acquired a searchable record from which strangers can build an entire person. The question of how much one episode gets to mean is no longer theoretical.
Late in the book, Jo begins to live among things that are less easily entered into a record. She leaves Peabody and drifts toward substitute teaching, a future her earlier self might have regarded as documentary proof that she failed. Misener does not reward her wrongdoing by teaching her to stop being ambitious, nor does the novel present a classroom as moral penance. Jo discovers instead that knowing the worst private fact about a student can make hatred harder. Friendship with Lily resumes without requiring Jo to become innocent first. Prayer returns almost accidentally. Her future is no longer the one she planned, but “unplanned” gradually ceases to sound like a verdict.
On Higgins Beach, years earlier, Georgie once persuaded Jo to build a moat against the incoming tide while their mother sat nearby, technically present and otherwise elsewhere. Misener first calls the activity a game, then removes the premise that makes a game a game: there is “no chance at winning.” What follows is work. Dig. Scoop. Heave. Bail. Jo becomes absorbed because there is a task; Georgie matches her effort. The grammar turns collective. They do not confess anything. They do not finally understand each other. They work beside each other until the ocean makes their plan ridiculous. That ending helps explain why “Good Guys” earns 88/100 and 4/5 stars from me. Its prose is exact rather than ostentatious, its alternating structure changes what each sister’s version can mean, and its best characterization refuses the convenience of choosing between sympathy and judgment. The too-neat parallels, thinner secondary figures, and burden placed on the Iraqi victim keep it below the exceptional range, but they are also part of why the book remains worth arguing with.
Still, when Jo and Georgie return to the beach at sunset, the sand is smooth. “No sign of our struggle remained.” This comes after photographs, articles, pill bottles, obituaries, journals, discs, and an internet record likely to outlast Jo’s shame. The absence of a trace does not make the moat a model for public truth; a war-crime accusation needs evidence strong enough to bear another person’s life. A childhood memory answers to a different standard because the two people in it were there. The tide wins. The moat is gone. What Georgie keeps is smaller than proof and, between sisters, perhaps more useful: each kept digging because the other had not stopped.
May 11, 2026
ARC review—
A good read. An interesting premise with some really great tensions and moments of character, but overall felt slightly underdeveloped. It was difficult to place the narrators in time, and the voices of the two narrators were so similar that it was hard to distinguish them for the first half of the book. I quite liked it. I’ll be interested to see if anything changes before publication.
A good read. An interesting premise with some really great tensions and moments of character, but overall felt slightly underdeveloped. It was difficult to place the narrators in time, and the voices of the two narrators were so similar that it was hard to distinguish them for the first half of the book. I quite liked it. I’ll be interested to see if anything changes before publication.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I requested and received an eARC of
Good Guys
by Mindy Misener via NetGalley. Georgie and Jo are sisters, but they are not close. Georgie tries, but there's only so much she can while Jo is away at college. And then Gary Clemmons dies in Iraq. The son of their pastor, a hometown sports hero, and the brother of Georgie's secret girlfriend. An all-around good guy. That is, until Georgie discovers some disturbing photos he took during the war, photos that constitute war crimes. When Georgia shares these photos with Jo to use to achieve her "big break" in journalism, things quickly spiral out of control.
Good Guys has a deeply interesting story that travels in many different directions. Something that I really enjoyed about this novel is the way the relationship between the sisters was depicted on the page. There’s love and protectiveness, but also that quiet sibling strife that affects so many of our relationships with our families. I liked both sisters as protagonists for different reasons. Many of Jo’s experiences as an undergraduate from a low-income background will likely resonate with readers, and I appreciated the way Misener lets those circumstances shape every aspect of her daily reality, from her dilapidated laptop to her limited social life. I also felt a kinship with Georgie, who is navigating coming to terms with her sexuality against a conservative and religious backdrop, something that is complicated by her choice of partner.
In addition to the deeply intriguing protagonists, Good Guys is also bolstered by a vibrant secondary cast of characters. Seamus, Lily, and Tara in particular felt fully realized and like people that I have encountered in my own life. There were so many wonderful layers to this novel. While the notion of investigating war crimes was the hook for me, what ultimately grabbed my attention about this book was the way that the author explored familial ties and the things that men are too often allowed to get away with. Thematically, the plot explores many tough conversations including sexual violence and the opioid crisis. Misener handles these complex issues with sincerity and sensitivity. This was a very solid read that I believe many people will find a lot of value in.
Good Guys has a deeply interesting story that travels in many different directions. Something that I really enjoyed about this novel is the way the relationship between the sisters was depicted on the page. There’s love and protectiveness, but also that quiet sibling strife that affects so many of our relationships with our families. I liked both sisters as protagonists for different reasons. Many of Jo’s experiences as an undergraduate from a low-income background will likely resonate with readers, and I appreciated the way Misener lets those circumstances shape every aspect of her daily reality, from her dilapidated laptop to her limited social life. I also felt a kinship with Georgie, who is navigating coming to terms with her sexuality against a conservative and religious backdrop, something that is complicated by her choice of partner.
In addition to the deeply intriguing protagonists, Good Guys is also bolstered by a vibrant secondary cast of characters. Seamus, Lily, and Tara in particular felt fully realized and like people that I have encountered in my own life. There were so many wonderful layers to this novel. While the notion of investigating war crimes was the hook for me, what ultimately grabbed my attention about this book was the way that the author explored familial ties and the things that men are too often allowed to get away with. Thematically, the plot explores many tough conversations including sexual violence and the opioid crisis. Misener handles these complex issues with sincerity and sensitivity. This was a very solid read that I believe many people will find a lot of value in.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
”Good Guys” is a complex novel, as are my feelings about it.
On one hand, once I got into the groove of the writing style—roughly three chapters in—I couldn’t put down this book. Misener’s uncomplicated prose is easy to devour. Combined with numerous plot points that have their own secrets to uncover but which also intertwine, I found myself at the edge of my seat and ultimately finished this book in only two days.
On the other hand, the story fell a little flat in the end. For how engrossed I became, by its conclusion, I felt like several major plot lines did not have a concrete resolution. Maybe this was intentional on Misener’s end, who writes three-dimensional characters that can’t be tucked neatly into a box in any capacity. Nevertheless, with such gripping storylines, readers can’t help but feel a bit let down that a shoe never quite dropped with real consequences and justice was never fully served, for even one character.
Nonetheless, “Good Guys” has many strengths, especially as a debut. While the overall early-2000s background can feel muddled at times, Misener immerses the reader in specific, recurrent rooms quite tactfully. Jo’s dorm room and college library, Georgie’s shared cluttered home and workplace, all feel developed down to what lurks in every draw and under every bed. The tail end of the story also provides a compelling focus on journalism—along with adding parallels to other relationships through the character dynamics introduced in this subsection—which I found particularly gripping.
“Good Guys” has many more discussion points that could be elaborated on. Though graphic and heavy in subject matter, I could see this as a book club or college seminar pick considering the conversation it yields.
Thank you Melville House for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Content warnings: The book’s description fully lays out what is in store. Caution for readers to really review the blurb before potentially picking up this read, as Misener spares no detail.
On one hand, once I got into the groove of the writing style—roughly three chapters in—I couldn’t put down this book. Misener’s uncomplicated prose is easy to devour. Combined with numerous plot points that have their own secrets to uncover but which also intertwine, I found myself at the edge of my seat and ultimately finished this book in only two days.
On the other hand, the story fell a little flat in the end. For how engrossed I became, by its conclusion, I felt like several major plot lines did not have a concrete resolution. Maybe this was intentional on Misener’s end, who writes three-dimensional characters that can’t be tucked neatly into a box in any capacity. Nevertheless, with such gripping storylines, readers can’t help but feel a bit let down that a shoe never quite dropped with real consequences and justice was never fully served, for even one character.
Nonetheless, “Good Guys” has many strengths, especially as a debut. While the overall early-2000s background can feel muddled at times, Misener immerses the reader in specific, recurrent rooms quite tactfully. Jo’s dorm room and college library, Georgie’s shared cluttered home and workplace, all feel developed down to what lurks in every draw and under every bed. The tail end of the story also provides a compelling focus on journalism—along with adding parallels to other relationships through the character dynamics introduced in this subsection—which I found particularly gripping.
“Good Guys” has many more discussion points that could be elaborated on. Though graphic and heavy in subject matter, I could see this as a book club or college seminar pick considering the conversation it yields.
Thank you Melville House for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Content warnings: The book’s description fully lays out what is in store. Caution for readers to really review the blurb before potentially picking up this read, as Misener spares no detail.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This is a story about two sisters, Georgie, the eldest who remains in the southern Maine home to care for her disabled father, and Jo, who escapes to a prestigious college in Massachusetts. Their mother had left years ago to seek her fortune as a Hollywood writer and has barely been in contact. The sisters have a complex relationship, not just because they have made different life decisions, but because Jo holds resentment that Georgie did not rescue her from an incident in which she was persuaded to engage in sex against her will.
The boy at issue, Gary, a golden boy athlete of the community, is later killed in action in Afghanistan and, through subterfuge, Jo obtains information about him that points to a potential war crime. What Jo does with this information becomes the crisis event toward the last part of the novel.
The strength of this book is in its complexity, in creating a difficult sibling relationship in which each sister is both blameless and responsible. While the author succeeds in creating this complex relationship, I often found it difficult to understand the reasons for each character's motivations and behavior, especially Georgie.
Character Development:4
Plot Development: 4
Quality of Writing: 4
Level of Engagement: 4
I was provided an ARC by the publisher via NetGalley.
The boy at issue, Gary, a golden boy athlete of the community, is later killed in action in Afghanistan and, through subterfuge, Jo obtains information about him that points to a potential war crime. What Jo does with this information becomes the crisis event toward the last part of the novel.
The strength of this book is in its complexity, in creating a difficult sibling relationship in which each sister is both blameless and responsible. While the author succeeds in creating this complex relationship, I often found it difficult to understand the reasons for each character's motivations and behavior, especially Georgie.
Character Development:4
Plot Development: 4
Quality of Writing: 4
Level of Engagement: 4
I was provided an ARC by the publisher via NetGalley.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I loved everything about this book from the setting to the plot. 2008 small town vibes and sisters with plenty of drama between them. The dark secret about war hero blows everything wide open and I couldn’t tear myself away. I loved the POV narration and the relatable topics in the book, especially the whole small town chaos. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
September 14, 2026
Good Guys missed the mark for me, unfortunately. It felt disjointed, rushed, and ultimately incomplete at the end of it all. As far as positives go, the characters seem like real people - flaws and all.
Review of advance copy received from Goodreads Giveaways
Great book! I was lucky to win this in a Goodreads Giveaway and I thoroughly enjoyed it!
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