Redemption Road

Starred review from February 29, 2016
In this stellar crime thriller, Edgar-winner Hart (Iron House) explores the human capacity for resilience and trust in the face of heartbreaking betrayal. North Carolina police detective Elizabeth Black faces the prospect of criminal charges arising from her gunning down two men who were sexually abusing 18-year-old Channing Shore in an abandoned house. Given that Elizabeth, a white cop, shot the men, who were black, 18 times, the incident has attracted major media attention. But Elizabeth seems strangely indifferent to the investigation’s outcome. Her plate gets even fuller after Adrian Wall, a cop she once had feelings for, is paroled after 13 years in jail for murdering a woman, a crime she always believed he didn’t commit, despite compelling forensic evidence. Adrian is almost gunned down by the victim’s revenge-seeking son and again finds himself a suspect when another woman is killed. Though Hart employs plot twists effectively, it’s his powerful, wounded but courageous lead whom readers will remember. 200,000 first printing; author tour. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

March 1, 2016
After an absence of five years, Hart finds more to mine in the fertile land of the Southern gothic. Hart returns brimming with plotlines and melodramatics. For starters, there are three emotionally and physically wounded characters. Front and center stands Elizabeth Black, a detective on the police force in an unnamed North Carolina city. Feisty, irrepressible Elizabeth has been furloughed after an incident in a cellar in which she pumped 18 bullets into two men who had bound and raped an 18-year-old girl named Channing. "Hero Cop or Angel of Death?" ask headlines, as a formal investigation into possibly excessive force looms likely. Elizabeth is also obsessed with Adrian Wall, an ex-cop in prison for the murder of Julia Strange. Black insists he's innocent; she also suspects she loves him. And so she ignores department orders to stay away from Wall, seeking him out soon after he's released from prison. Meanwhile, in a vivid scene that opens the book, Julia Strange's son, Gideon, a 14-year-old whose "thoughts [run] crooked sometimes," lights out from home and his father, "an empty man," to shoot Wall the morning he walks free. Elizabeth, Channing, and Gideon are linked by troubled relationships with their parents, and the offsprings' efforts to surmount the discord becomes a major theme in the book. There are, as well, other pertinent tropes--Wall's case eventually raises issues of police corruption and prison abuse. Threaded through the steadily paced plot is a series of cross-cuts to the first-person narration of an unidentified man, a lurking bogeyman who moves, unobserved, among the other characters as he kidnaps and tortures several women. His identity is not hard to guess, and the familiarity of his scenes, however chilling, mars the plotting. A protracted action scene resolves the strands of the plot, and a touching epilogue lends a closing note of poignancy. Enough characters, confrontations, secrets, and subplots to fill the stage of an opera house--and leave spectators from the orchestra to the balcony moved and misty-eyed.

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February 1, 2016

After rescuing a teenage girl from two kidnapper/rapists and shooting them 18 times, Det. Elizabeth Black, a 13-year veteran in North Carolina, faces suspension. Adrian Wall, a former cop, is just getting out of prison after 13 years, having been tortured by a sadistic warden seeking a robbery stash. Wall was convicted of leaving Julia Strange's body on the church altar where Elizabeth's father is pastor. A second and then a third murdered woman appear on the altar of the now abandoned church and Wall is the suspect. When nine graves are found beneath the altar, Elizabeth and Wall, both now fugitives, frantically try to evade capture while seeking the real killer. VERDICT Hart is a former stockbroker and defense lawyer whose last two novels have won consecutive Edgar Awards (The Last Child and Down River). He is a skilled writer who can plumb the minds of a wide range of characters while building tension with an intricate plot and revealing backstories. The somewhat overly idyllic ending doesn't detract much from readers' wonder at this accomplished achievement. [See Prepub Alert, 11/23/15.]--Roland Person, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2016
It's been five long years since readers were racing through Hart's gripping Iron House, but, finally, it's time again for heart rates to soar. Returning to small-town North Carolina, Hart unwinds another complex plot, rich in backstory but driven by a propulsive main narrative in which troubled cop Elizabeth Black (Hart's first female protagonist) deals with a closetful of demons as she tries to track a serial killer who stages grisly murders in an abandoned church where her estranged father once ministered to his devoted flock. In the background, however, there is the equally compelling story of 14-year-old Gideon Strange, whose mother was one of the killer's victims and who has vowed to exact revenge on the man convicted of the crime, former cop Adrian Wall, released from prison after 13 years as the novel opens. Elizabeth, quietly in love with Adrian, still believes in his innocence, but when another murder occurs, and all clues point again to Adrian, she finds herself forced to make choices that will define the rest of her life. The identity of the killer, though not revealed until nearly the end, is evident early on, but somehow that hardly matters, either in terms of the steadily ratcheting tension or our involvement with the three central characters, whose inner lives are as much of the story here as their eventual fates in the maelstrom of violence that engulfs them. Hart plays brilliantly on the tradition of the southern gothic, but his grasp of character gives this noveland all his worksthe extra dimension that extends his audience well beyond adrenaline junkies.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Edgar winner and a writer who's batting 1,000 on New York Times best-sellers, Hart hasn't lost his touch.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)