Dear Sister

Starred review from October 16, 2023
Horton’s incendiary debut catalogs her efforts to get her sister released from prison. In 2017, Horton was stunned to learn that her younger sibling, Nikki Addimando, had been arrested by police in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for fatally shooting her boyfriend, Chris Grover, with his own gun. During a phone call with Horton following the arrest, Addimando admitted to the killing, claiming Grover had brandished the firearm and threatened to kill her first. She also revealed to Horton that Grover had been brutally abusing her for years, including while she was pregnant with their daughter, Faye. Despite ample evidence of Grover’s abuse, Addimando was convicted of second-degree murder in 2019 and sentenced to 19 years in prison (reduced to 7.5 years in 2021 under the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act). Horton recounts her desperate attempts to convince the prosecutor not to pursue the case and the toll it took on her own son, Noah, when she assumed responsibility for Addimando’s two children. With Addimando still behind bars, Horton’s narrative offers little comfort, but it serves as a powerful testament to the tenacity of sisterly bonds, a scathing indictment of the legal landscape for abused women, and a wrenching exploration of the shame that allows abuse to remain hidden. This is difficult to forget. Agent: Eve MacSweeney, Calligraph.

October 15, 2023
Horton pulls back the curtain on domestic abuse in a shocking, true story of her sister Nikki Addimando, who shot her partner after enduring years of cruelty at his hands. Addimando, now in prison, is living the "abuse to prison pipeline." This high-profile case elicited a lot of media attention because Addimando was a young, white mom from a middle-class suburb and had an unusual amount of public support for her situation. Horton peels back the layers, drawing readers into her sister's life, filled with childhood and partner exploitation, all the while wondering how they all missed the signs of abuse. She sheds a new light on the criminal-justice system and its treatment of incarcerated women, the majority of whom are in prison due to self-defense. All the while, her love for her sister, who was in a "kill or be killed situation," shines through in the human side of the story. Told through letters, phone calls, and prison visits, Dear Sister will draw readers into Addimando's plight and the aftermath that impacted her family and strengthened the relationship of the two sisters.

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December 15, 2023
A scarifying story of domestic abuse, murder, and justice gone awry. The sister of the title is Horton's own, Nikki, a young woman whose difficult life got incalculably worse when her boyfriend forced her to participate in pornography that involved rape and battery--and who then beat and tortured her himself. Although a police officer tracked these videos on porn sites and recommended prosecution, "Nikki...was embarrassed and scared of the repercussions," as Horton writes of her sister. She was also afraid for her safety. The consequences became far more severe when, at the breaking point, Nikki shot her boyfriend dead and was immediately charged with homicide. Brought to trial, Nikki had perfect-storm misfortunes: Her defense was unprepared and, by Horton's account, barely competent, while for reasons of her own, the prosecutor was determined to paint a portrait of Nikki as a conniver who had engineered a murder, "a manipulative liar who faked abuse allegations and murdered [him] in his sleep, when he was defenseless." In fact, they learned that the boyfriend was planning to murder Nikki and then kill himself. The prosecutor was successful, and in the course of the cascading results that followed--and that beggar belief in their patent injustice--Nikki was sentenced to a term that, even when procedural errors were unveiled under appeal, was reduced from possible life imprisonment to just a few years--"a monumental victory," if one that still presumed Nikki as the guilty party. Horton is hardly dispassionate in her presentation, but she is admirably evenhanded in showing the devastation that the events wrought on the children and extended families involved on all sides--all of whom, Horton affectingly writes, have shared in the trauma of crime and punishment. A troubling narrative that calls for judicial reform--and more judicial accountability--to protect those who suffer abuse.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from January 1, 2024

Abuse perpetuated over several years led Nikki Addimando to kill her partner in self-defense in 2017. It sent her and her family into a nightmarish spiral of pain, fear, and despair as they traversed and often fought the criminal justice system. Horton, Nikki's sister, was a newly divorced single mother at the time. She soon became a full-time parental figure/caregiver to her sister's two small children and the leader in the fight for justice for her sister and other domestic violence victims. In this raw, emotionally charged memoir that reads like a suspense novel, Horton takes readers through her discoveries of the systemic abuse her sister suffered since childhood, at the hands of several people. Horton recounts feeling helpless and anguished in not knowing the truth. The sisters' loving bond shines through the pain in this book, bringing much needed light to an otherwise heavy story. VERDICT An essential purchase. Through countless extensions of jail time without a bail hearing, changes in attorneys, depositions, and heartbreaking jail visits, this strong narrative points to the realities of the United States' criminal justice system and how it can fail the most vulnerable.--Katy Duperry

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