Can a love interrupted for forty-six years survive the truth that was kept hidden?
In 1970, fifteen-year-old Matt Benson moves with his widowed father, Robert, from Chicago to Boaz, Alabama.
Robert, a professor of Bible history and New Testament theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is conducting research on Southern Baptist fundamentalism. Matt agrees to help by immersing himself in the youth group at First Baptist Church of Christ and getting to know the teenagers growing up inside that world.
There he meets Olivia Tillman, the fourteen-year-old daughter of the church’s pastor.
Olivia is devoted to her faith, her family, and her church. Matt is full of questions. She hopes to win him to Christ. Instead, the two become inseparable.
Their teenage romance is cut short when Matt returns to Chicago in 1971. They promise to stay connected.
Life has other plans.
Forty-six years later, Matt and Olivia unexpectedly find themselves together again in Boaz.
Now in their sixties, they have a month to discover whether what they once shared can survive everything that happened in between.
But time is not the only thing separating them.
Their beliefs have changed.
Their lives have changed.
And Olivia has kept a secret that may change what remains between them.
Beneath the Story
The Boaz Secrets is a love story, but beneath the romance are questions about belief, memory, loyalty, truth, and the cost of what remains hidden.
It asks:
- What happens when two people who once loved each other grow into very different adults?
- Can love survive profound differences in belief?
- How much of who we become is shaped by the faith, family, and culture we inherit?
- What does one person owe another when an old secret still has the power to wound?
- Can truth restore a relationship, or does it sometimes destroy what remains?
- How much of the past can be reclaimed after nearly half a century apart?
Matt and Olivia’s story places love, belief, memory, and truth under the pressure of time.
About the Novel
Genre: Southern Fiction / Romance / Family Drama / Literary Suspense
Setting: Boaz, Alabama
Time Periods: 1970–1971 and 2017–2018
Author: Richard L. Fricks
Part of: The Boaz Novels
From Richard
The Boaz Secrets allowed me to explore something I continue to find compelling in fiction: how people change over long stretches of time, and what happens when the past returns before they are ready for it.
At the center of the novel is a question that goes beyond romance: whether two people can truly know one another again after decades of separation, changed beliefs, different lives, and a truth that has been withheld for years.
The novel also returns to territory that appears throughout my fiction—belief and doubt, loyalty and betrayal, truth and deception, and the ways the past continues shaping the present long after people think they have moved on.
