The Long Game is not a political novel in the obvious sense. It does not lecture. It does not take sides in the way that a polemical work might. But it is a novel with a sharp and consistent awareness of who has power in the world it depicts, and who does not — and of what happens when the people without power seek redress for wrongs that the powerful would prefer to forget.

Who Gets Taken Seriously

The novel opens with a telling dynamic. Mary King, the daughter of a dead miner, insists that...

Every murder mystery is, in one sense, a story about a secret. Something has been hidden. Someone knows more than they are saying. The detective’s job is to find what has been concealed and bring it into the light.

But The Long Game is a novel in which secrets operate at every level — personal, communal and institutional — and in which the keeping of secrets is not so much a moral failure as a cultural practice. In the world of Regent Park West, Pendlebury, you didn’t talk about certain...

There is a particular kind of loyalty that forms between people who have faced genuine danger together. Soldiers know it. Miners knew it. The men who went underground together every day, who depended on each other in conditions that were genuinely life-threatening, formed bonds that the surface world could barely comprehend.

Kerry Costello’s The Long Game is a novel about what happens when those bonds are broken — and about how long the consequences of betrayal can echo through a life.

Regent...