FOR NOTHING IS HIDDEN
FULL BOOK TITLE: For Nothing Is Hidden: Inspired by One of the Oldest Unsolved Missing Child Cases in U.S. History
AUTHOR NAME: John A. Valenti 3rd
PUBLISHER NAME: Bushwickborn Productions, Inc. / Pope Brothers Ink
LINK: https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Hidden-John-Valenti-3rd/dp/B0FX98ZVWM/
There are mysteries that entertain, and then there are mysteries that sit with you—quietly, insistently—long after exposure. For Nothing Is Hidden belongs to the latter.
Set against the manicured calm of 1950s Long Island, John A. Valenti 3rd’s debut novel opens with a moment so ordinary it feels almost cruel in hindsight: a mother steps into a bakery, a child waits outside, and the world tilts off its axis. Bobby Goodson is gone. No scream, no witness, no trail. Just absence. From that void, Valenti constructs a narrative that is less about solving a crime than about tracing the long shadow it casts over a family and a town for more than fifty years.
That sense of authenticity is no accident. Valenti brings to fiction the instincts of a journalist who has spent four decades uncovering truths that others missed or preferred not to see. A national award–winning reporter for Newsday, whose investigative work helped expose everything from a massive sports-fraud scheme to systemic failures in public safety, Valenti understands how facts erode over time—and how persistence and patience matter more than spectacle. This is a novelist who knows when to press and when to wait, when to let silence speak louder than accusation.
What makes For Nothing Is Hidden so unsettling is precisely that restraint. Valenti resists the easy theatrics of modern true crime. There are no melodramatic flourishes, no indulgent cliffhangers. Instead, the prose moves with the patience of an investigator turning over evidence that has already been handled too many times. The result feels eerily authentic—like reading a case file that keeps reopening itself against your will.
At the emotional center of the novel is Colleen Goodson. She is not flattened into a symbol of motherhood or tragedy. She is impulsive, wounded, defensive, and enduring. In an era quick to assign blame—especially to working-class women—Colleen becomes both the object of suspicion and the vessel of grief. Valenti never asks to absolve her; instead, he asks us to understand the cost of living inside unanswered questions. Watching her age through the decades, you feel how loss adapts itself to new false hopes.
As someone who does not seek out crime fiction—and who reads this book through the lens of parenthood—the experience is harrowing. For Nothing Is Hidden has a way of making the mundane terrifying. It makes you scan crowds differently. It makes you hold your children’s hands a little tighter and linger just a second longer at the curb. This is not anxiety for shock value; it is the natural byproduct of a story written by someone who understands how easily truth can vanish—and how long it can take to bring it back.
By the time Valenti closes the book, he has not handed the reader a neat solution. Instead, he leaves us with something far more honest: the ache of unresolved truth, the quiet insistence that time does not erase questions, and the unsettling reminder—echoed in the novel’s biblical epigraph—that what is hidden is never truly gone.
Author Bio:
A national award-winning reporter for Newsday and author of the critically acclaimed Swee'pea and Other Playground Legends, about former All-American Lloyd (Swee'pea) Daniels and New York City playground basketball [Published by Michael Kesend Publishing, Ltd., 1990 / Reissued by Simon & Schuster imprint Atria Books, July 2016], John A. Valenti 3rd has appeared on hundreds of television and radio shows, including NPR and Good Morning America with Charles Gibson. He's had featured roles in The Legend of Swee'pea, an award-winning documentary by Benjamin May, and the Emmy-winning ESPN 30-for-30 Big Shot by Kevin Connolly - the latter the story of how John Spano fleeced Fleet Bank out of $80 million to buy the NHL New York Islanders while claiming to be a Dallas multimillionaire and how Valenti headed a team of Newsday reporters and uncovered the truth, leading to the federal conviction of Spano. A veteran of four decades with Newsday, Valenti has been honored with national first-places finishes in the prestigious Society of the Silurians, Associated Press Sports Editors and National Headliner Award competitions, including APSE Best Enterprise Reporting in 1996 as part of team that reported a ground-breaking series on concussions and for Best Investigative Reporting in 1997 for his investigation of Spano. He was the lead columnist on Newsday's "Death on the Roads" series that earned the esteemed Silurians Community Service Award in 2004, was part of a team that took first place in the 2007 Silurians competition for "Death of a Yankee," the reporting of the plane crash that killed New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle, and the 2012 First Place award by Silurians for Online Breaking News coverage of 2011 Tropical Storm Irene. He also was part of the Newsday team that won the 2024 National Headliner Award for breaking news coverage of the arrest of alleged Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann. Valenti has covered Major League Baseball, the NBA, NHL, the 1994 World Cup Soccer Tournament, major-college sports and breaking news events and Newsday submitted his work for Pulitzer Prize consideration at least 10 times between 1987 and 2024. Among notable figures Valenti has interviewed include: Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Julius Erving, Billie Jean King, Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Mario Andretti, Wayne Gretzky, Pele and the first two men to walk on the Moon - Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. He was a candidate for the 1986 NASA-sponsored "Journalist in Space Project" and made his critically acclaimed debut as a poet in 13 Poets from Long Island in 2023. For Nothing is Hidden is his debut novel. Valenti lives in Elmhurst, Queens, with wife and longtime companion Elizabeth Eser Jose. He has one son, Jarek.
