Hearts of Stone

February 13, 2017
Smith’s absorbing, if downbeat, second thriller featuring ex-con Carl Burns (after 2016’s Rough Justice) opens on a lovely autumn day at River Road Farm outside Talbotville, Ontario. Carl is working in the barn; Frances Rourke, Carl’s partner who owns the farm, is preparing for the local TV cooking show she hosts; and Stacy Fulton, who runs the online sales for the farm’s organic products, is throwing a Frisbee for Boomer, the farm’s border collie pup. Meanwhile, three lowlife thugs are about to raid River Road. The subsequent horrific attack leaves Frances in a coma. With Carl’s help the police manage to catch the culprits, but legal wrangling puts the prosecution of the guilty parties at risk. The courtroom action builds to a surprising denouement. In the aftermath of the terrifying ordeal, Carl copes as best he can with depression and numbing helplessness, until he finally decides to take things into his own hands. Readers will wonder where Carl will land in his next outing.

February 1, 2017
An Ontario felon-turned-farmer seeks justice against the petty criminals who casually destroyed his household.Mostly, Carl Burns just tries to keep his head down while helping his girlfriend, organic farmer/TV personality Frances Rourke, work River Valley Farm. But Stanley "Chino" Carter has other plans. Facing a mounting and unpayable gambling debt to Johnny K, who's not the sort of man to forgive and forget, he teams up with Larry "Bug" Murdock and Billy Taylor, an unemployed Mohawk with the incomparable advantage of having no criminal record, to smuggle drugs across the U.S. border. When that episode leaves Chino still short, he and his two sidekicks stage a home invasion at River Valley Farm, reasoning that since Frances is on television, she must be worth at least $1 million. This enterprise ends still more badly, leaving one person dead and Frances' farmhouse burned to the ground. Though Carl can not only identify Bug as one of the perps, but spots him, gives chase, and ends up literally dumping him in front of Detective Rachel Pulford of the Rose City Police, dapper ambulance-chasing attorney Pearce Walker, who's attached himself to Bug, claims that Carl, who was already convicted once of arson (Rough Justice, 2016), staged the scene and set the fire himself. And Frances, who'd normally back up Carl's identification in a heartbeat, lies in a coma as the days turn into weeks.Smith's unsparing depiction of a small-town justice system that depends on "everybody's ratting everybody out" works against mystery and suspense but allows a sense of monstrous injustice to fester till it's ready to explode.

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February 15, 2017
The narrative arc of Smith's second Carl Burns novel (following Rough Justice, 2016) may strike some as uncomfortably similar to that of its predecessorcertainly, the justice is still plenty roughbut that shouldn't detract readers from appreciating the unusual appeal of Burns as a protagonist. An ordinary man who can't stay clear of extraordinary, violence-riddled intrusions into his life, Burns reacts to trouble with a square-jawed, Gary Cooperlike determination to set things right. So it is here, when his well-ordered life on an organic farm with partner Frances Rourke, now the star of a TV cooking show, is thrown tragically out of plumb by a home invasion. Smith effectively contrasts long segments of farm life with sharp bursts of action, as Burns, a man who knows how to do all manner of stuffconstruct a sugar shack, tap a tree for maple syrup, rebuild an engine (all of which are described in precise, even loving detail)finds himself once again confronted with a situation that even the handiest of men may not be able to fix. We surely want more of Burns, but next time a freshened story line would be welcome.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2016
The quintessential Brad Smith hero is an ex-con attempting to live a quiet life who finds himself drawn back into the world of violence, usually to help out someone he loves. Following in the tradition of Ray Dokes (All Hat, 2003) and series hero Virgil Cain (Red Means Run, 2012), Carl Burns lands in prison after taking a quixotic stand against corruption and absorbing the unintended consequences. Now out of prison, he has returned to his small Ontario hometown to support his estranged daughter, Kate, who is one of three witnesses in the rape trial of the town's mayor. The trial goes bad, and Kate slips slowly into addiction and depression. Burns watches helplessly, biding his time and helping the sister of his ex-wife attempt to battle a ruthless land-grabber. Typically, Smith combines elements of the comic caper novel with gritty thriller fare, but this time the comedy and the banter take a backseat to real-world realism. Even in a hard world, however, there's always room for fighting back, and nobody does stand-up guys better than Smith.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)