This year's Edgar Award winner for Best Novel.
Adam Chase returns to his North Carolina home after five years in New York City, during which time he has not been in contact with his family. They are the standard-issue Southern thriller family: abusive father; borderline alcoholic stepmother; and her children, a jock who won't grow up and a fragile ingenue with emotional problems.
The plot is fairly standard stuff, too. Adam has a history of violence, and left town after being acquitted of murder charges (stepmommy was the prosecution's star witness, and she still thinks he did it); almost immediately upon his return, bodies start popping up everywhere. It all seems to be connected to a land deal; the power company wants to build a plant, and Adam's father is the last holdout, refusing to sell.
There's a neighbor girl of mysterious parentage (because you're not allowed to set a mystery in the South without at least one wild child of mysterious parentage lurking about); there's Dad's sidekick, positioned awkwardly at the intersection of best friend, family retainer, and slave; and there's the old woman in the wheelchair whose dialogue consists mostly of cryptic oracular pronouncements.
The shame of it all is that Hart can write; as familiar as his characters are, he does bring some depth to them, and they're convincingly real people. Even the plotting manages a few small surprises along the way. But telling a story well isn't enough if the story is so stale that it's not worth telling it again.
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