Fury in Her Eyes by Phillip Vega

An intensely personal drama, Fury in Her Eyes by Phillip Vega is a thrilling and unpredictable portrait of connection, resentment, and romance that refuses to die.

Ollie Morales is living out his high-stakes dream as a professional photojournalist when a mob of Trump supporters nearly beats him to death on January 6^th, 2021, sending his life into chaos. While he assumes that the explosion of violence was random, it gradually becomes clear that what happened to him was no accident.

Thirty years earlier, Ollie had been a normal high school senior, a photographer on the school paper, and not someone who would miraculously snag the attention of a beautiful new student from Belgium, but the throes of new love are marred by two violent attacks on a fellow student and editor of the paper, Jackie Woodley. Navigating the emotional minefield of his first case, Ollie is determined to solve the mystery, without losing the woman of his dreams.

Authentically capturing the ecstasy, anguish, and anxiety of teenage love is not an easy task for any author, but Vega has a knack for casual conversation and the mental hurricanes of early romance. The time-jumping nature of the plot is also effective for unveiling each character’s motivations, so readers see the formative moments that drive Ollie into a life of passion and danger. Bringing the plots from two timelines back together is done subtly and slowly, with key revelations being held close to the chest for more than half the book, making the novel hard to put down.

Some of the flashback sections drag on a bit extensively, adding to schoolyard exposition readers already have, but this is an enveloping work of contemporary fiction, reminding readers that the past echoes throughout our lives, and is never truly over.