Redemption road / John Hart.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Now a New York Times Bestseller

Over 2 million copies of his books in print. The first and only author to win back-to-back Edgars for Best Novel. Every book a New York Times bestseller.

Since his debut bestseller, The King of Lies , reviewers across the country have heaped praise on John Hart. Each novel has taken Hart higher on the New York Times Bestseller list as his masterful writing and assured evocation of place have won readers around the world and earned history's only consecutive Edgar Awards for Best Novel with Down River and The Last Child . Now, Hart delivers his most powerful story yet.

Imagine:

A boy with a gun waits for the man who killed his mother.

A troubled detective confronts her past in the aftermath of a brutal shooting.

After thirteen years in prison, a good cop walks free as deep in the forest, on the altar of an abandoned church, a body cools in pale linen...

This is a town on the brink.

This is Redemption Road.

Brimming with tension, secrets, and betrayal, Redemption Road proves again that John Hart is a master of the literary thriller.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Hart (The Last Child) starts this story with a bang: an ex-cop released from prison, a gun-toting boy out for revenge, a cop accused of executing a pair of child rapists, and more, all converging on a city ready to explode. And when murdered women are found in an abandoned church, that discovery leads to nine graves under the altar. The depth of emotion in Hart's words is palpable, and listeners will feel every nuanced sentiment that the characters are experiencing. The narration of Scott Shepherd is exceptionally well done, particularly his inflections and judicious use of pauses. VERDICT Highly recommended for listeners who enjoy well--constructed crime fiction. ["The somewhat overly idyllic ending doesn't detract much from readers' wonder at this accomplished achievement": LJ 2/1/16 review of the Thomas Dunne: St. Martin's hc.]-Scott R. DiMarco, Mansfield Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

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. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* 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 novel and all his works the 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.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2016 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

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 tropesWall'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 houseand leave spectators from the orchestra to the balcony moved and misty-eyed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.