The Mean Streets

*Down River

by John Hart

Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Minotaur  $24.95

ISBN 0-312-35931-4  October 2007                                     

* Full Review (Mystery News – October/November 2007)

You can’t go home again. At least not if you’re Adam Chase and especially not if, five years earlier, you were tried and acquitted of a murder that everyone (including members of your own family) still believe you committed. But go home he does to Rowan County, North Carolina and to his family’s sprawling farm on the banks of the Yadkin River in response to a cryptic plea for help from his only remaining friend, the hard-living Danny Faith. Hours after returning from veritable exile in New York, however, Adam is beaten and his car has the word “killer” gouged into the hood. All that’s just a warm-up since Adam’s troubles only really begin when Faith’s body is discovered hidden in a ravine on the Chase property. You get three guesses as to whom the authorities pursue as their prime suspect. Not even Adam’s ex-girlfriend, Detective Robin Alexander, is sure what she thinks. And as for Adam’s influential father, well, the pair’s already strained relationship is just about ready to snap … with catastrophic force.

As Chase fights to clear his name and to discover the real reason behind his mother’s suicide nearly two decades ago, he unearths a family secret that, like slow-acting poison, has gradually sapped the life from his friends and relatives down through the years. Flowing like the often muddy waters of his beloved river through the middle of the Chase homestead, the alluvial deposit of the choices made years earlier hasn’t brought fertility or prosperity but desolation and ruin: “The river is my earliest memory. The front porch of my father’s house looks down on it from a low knoll, and I have pictures, faded yellow, of my first days on that porch. I slept in my mother’s arms as she rocked there, played in the dust while my father fished, and I know the feel of that river even now: the slow churn of red clay, the back eddies under cut banks, the secrets it whispered to the hard, pink granite of Rowan County. Everything that shaped me happened near that river. I lost my mother in sight of it, fell in love on its banks. I could smell it on the day my father drove me out. It was part of my soul.”  More than a few people are willing to kill in order to ensure that even those haunted, halting whispers are silenced.

John Hart’s first novel, King of Lies, was a New York Times bestseller. Down River is even better. Written with the lyrical grace and power of Raymond Chandler, this novel will also remind readers of Ross MacDonald. Indeed, although separated now by more than forty years and over two thousand miles, Hart and MacDonald traverse the same emotional terrain here … the foul-rag and bone-strewn mean streets of the human heart and the often sordid alleys of the ever-shifting modern American moral landscape. Couched as a thriller, Down River at its core is a novel about the power of the past to affect the present and the future – for good or ill. Loyalty, betrayal, retribution and the elusiveness of redemption are the key ingredients in a tale that will enervate and entertain at the same time. Both muscular and moving, the plot here is as multi-layered and labyrinthine as anything every created by MacDonald.Despite a small measure of melodrama – especially in the relationship between Adam and Robin Alexander – Hart is in full control all the way. The narrative possesses a fundamental coherence and plausibility. The dénouement is almost karmic in terms of its inevitability. The doom that befalls the House of Chase follows ineluctably, tragically even, from actions and decisions that were made years earlier. The novel simply could not have ended any other way. The moral ambiguity that attends much of the action in the story only adds to its overall depth and (especially) to its psychological profundity.

Riveting action, compelling characters and magnificent use of a powerful and picturesque setting all come together in a story that resonates on an archetypal level. Those elements almost guarantee that Down River will garner multiple award nominations at the end of the year; and rightfully so. Many authors write thrillers that aspire to the level of literature but which nonetheless fall woefully short. A very few others write literature that just happens also to make use of the thriller form. To that latter select group we can now add the name of John Hart.

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