Recently I was chatting with a leading figure in British crime writing about top quality rural noir tales set in the United States. Immediately this exceptional, Edgar Award-winning novel from lawyer turned author John Hart came to mind.
In Down River, five years after Adam Chase was falsely accused of the murder of a local football star as a teenager, he returns to Rowan County from exile in New York following a cryptic call from an old friend. But now the friend is missing, many in the town still believe Adam got away with murder, and his father – who sided with Adam’s stepmother who was a witness for the prosecution in Adam’s trial – is the lone holdout as local landowners look to cash in and sell their land at big profits for a nuclear power plant.
When new bodies start turning up, the small town rises against Adam again, and the angry young man finds himself in the fight of his life. Hart delivers a compelling tale that engages through its deep characterisation and spider-webbed relationships as much as through plot twists or action (though there’s plenty of the latter, too). Down River is a literary thriller of the highest order, though with its first-person perspective by a troubled, angry young man, it may not be for everyone. Southern Gothic sensibilities, overflowing with depth, complexity, authenticity, and Hart’s prose is lush and lyrical. Superb.
Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Hart is the author of six New York Times bestsellers. The only author in history to win the best novel Edgar Award for consecutive novels, John has also won the Barry Award, the Southern Independent Bookseller’s Award for Fiction, the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, the Southern Book Prize and the North Carolina Award for Literature. His novels have been translated into thirty languages and can be found in over seventy countries.
A former defense attorney and stockbroker, John lives on a farm in Virginia, where he writes full-time.
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