What happens when two women decide that the justice denied to them must be created for themselves?
In the summer of 2017, Katie Sims returns to her hometown of Boaz, Alabama, with her daughter, Cullie.
Katie will teach English at Boaz High School. Cullie will attend as a student.
Fifteen years earlier, during the Christmas holidays, Katie was sexually assaulted by five men from prominent local families. Nine months later, Cullie was born.
At Boaz High, Katie quickly becomes close friends with fellow teacher Cindy Barker. Together they teach English, literature, and creative writing to hundreds of students.
But the school year soon brings another form of abuse.
For weeks, Katie and Cindy endure relentless sexual harassment from the assistant principal. Then Cindy suffers an attack that echoes what happened to Katie years earlier.
The two women decide they have had enough.
They devise a plan they call Six Red Apples—a way to confront six men they believe have escaped accountability.
But once they begin, Katie and Cindy create a dilemma of their own:
when justice fails, how far can a person go before justice becomes revenge?
Beneath the Story
The Boaz Schoolteacher is a mystery-thriller about violence, power, friendship, justice, and revenge.
It asks:
- What happens when influential men are protected from consequences?
- What does repeated institutional failure do to the people it harms?
- When does the pursuit of justice become revenge?
- Can wrongdoing ever justify wrongdoing in return?
- What responsibility follows when someone takes justice into their own hands?
- How far can loyalty and friendship carry people once they cross a moral line together?
Katie and Cindy’s choices place them at the intersection of suffering, power, conscience, responsibility, justice, and revenge.
About the Novel
Genre: Mystery / Thriller / Southern Fiction
Setting: Boaz, Alabama
Time Period: 2017
Author: Richard L. Fricks
Part of: The Boaz Novels
From Richard
The Boaz Schoolteacher is one of the novels in which the question beneath the plot is especially clear.
Katie and Cindy are not simply trying to survive what has happened to them. They are forced to decide what justice means when the systems around them have failed to provide it.
That question—what an ordinary person may feel justified in doing when power protects wrongdoing—has continued to interest me in later novels.
The story also explores something equally important: the bond between two people who become willing to risk almost everything for one another.
