Down River by John Hart

Something said on one of the listservs I subscribe to (Dorothy_L – for Mystery writers, readers, and others) caused me to pick up this book, and I’m so glad I did. It was a real page-turner.

Adam Chase is returning to Rowan County, North Carolina after being thrown out of his home and hometown by his father five years before. Although he’d been acquitted of the murder of Grey Wilson, the stigma of the accusation (made by his father’s second wife, Janice) still attaches to him, and in the first few hours of his return, the word “Killer” is scratched into the hood of his car. After that, many aspects of his life go downhill. The police break up the fight between him and Zebulon Faith, the father of his best friend Danny, and the supposed defacer of the car.

Adam has come home because Danny called him in New York, asking for his help on a matter which Danny wants to discuss with him. But Danny isn’t around when Adam gets to town. So Adam goes to his ancestral home, where he sees his adoptive brother, his father, and a young woman named Grace, who is of obscure parentage, but living on the property as the granddaughter of his father’s best friend, Dolf Shepherd. Adam loves Grace as a sister, and has always felt loved in return, but this time Grace tells him that she hates him, acts seductive, and confuses him considerably. Adam returns to his police officer girlfriend, Robin. But that seems to be an ambivalent relationship as well. When Robin chose not to leave with Adam five years, she relied on her job to keep herself sane, and she became Super cop.
It turns out that Grace has been beaten up and Adam is assumed to be the culprit, so Robin and Detective Grantham, new since Adam left the County, but certainly aware of Adam’s history, arrest him for the violence against Grace. Soon he is let go, but crimes against the people Adam loves soon mount up. And Adam seems to get in the way at every turn.

In fact, Adam finds his friend Danny’s body stuffed into a crevasse in a mountain, and Dolf takes on the burden of that guilt, even though most people realize that he is innocent. Forensic evidence shows that Danny has been dead in the mountain since about the time that he called Adam, so he was not Grace’s attacker, even though his ring was found in the vicinity.

When the police seem to be getting nowhere, Adam begins his own detective work, making the painful discoveries that the people that he loved and trusted, as well as those he did not, have not always been who they seemed to be, and blood is on the hands of more than one member of his family.

This plays out like a Greek tragedy. When it is all over, there are many corpses all around, and many painful revelations. Adam’s family is pulled apart irrevocably, in the name of truth. There are small flickers of salvation and understanding, but the motives, all too human in their origin, have created secrets all too horrible in their depth. Like the classic tragedies, it makes for thrilling reading. Recommended.