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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Oct 2007, 336 pages
Paperback:
Sep 2008, 384 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Vy Armour
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After being narrowly acquitted of a murder charge, Adam Chase is hounded out of the only home he’s ever known, exiled for a sin he did not commit. For five long years he disappears. Now he’s back and nobody knows why, not his family or the cops, not the enemies he left behind.
Adam Chase has a violent streak, and not without reason. As a boy, he saw things that no child should see, suffered wounds that cut to the core and scarred thin. The trauma left him passionate and misunderstood---a fighter. After being narrowly acquitted of a murder charge, Adam is hounded out of the only home he’s ever known, exiled for a sin he did not commit. For five long years he disappears, fades into the faceless gray of New York City. Now he’s back and nobody knows why, not his family or the cops, not the enemies he left behind.
But Adam has his reasons.
Within hours of his return, he is beaten and accosted, confronted by his family and the women he still holds dear. No one knows what to make of Adam’s return, but when bodies start turning up, the small town rises against him and Adam again finds himself embroiled in the fight of his life, not just to prove his own innocence, but to reclaim the only life he’s ever wanted.
Bestselling author John Hart holds nothing back as he strips his characters bare. Secrets explode, emotions tear, and more than one person crosses the brink into deadly behavior as he examines the lengths to which people will go for money, family, and revenge.
A powerful, heart-pounding thriller, Down River will haunt your thoughts long after the last page is turned.
Chapter 1
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, and I thought I’d lost it forever.
But things can change, that’s what I told myself. Mistakes can be undone, wrongs righted. That’s what brought me home.
Hope.
And anger.
I’d been awake for thirty-six hours and driving for ten. Restless weeks, sleepless nights, and the decision stole into me like a thief. I never ...
t's rare that one would want to read a mystery again, but once the motives are revealed, it sheds new light on all the characters' previous behaviors. In spite of some repetitive self-reflection on Adam's part, Down River is a book that warrants reading at least once and perhaps once again for the skillful plot and descriptive language...continued
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(Reviewed by Vy Armour).
Rowan County, North Carolina (official website), the setting for King of Lies and Down River, is seeped in fascinating early American history. According to Indian Tribal Records, theSaponi Indian Tribe was found dwelling on theYadkin River in 1701, near the present site ofSalisbury; they had moved to the area to escape attacks by their enemies, giving credence to the legend told on page 103 of Down River: "…this was all Sapona Indian country. Like most Indians, they didn't want to give up the land. … there were maybe three-hundred people living in that village. The men had been shot…but most of the women and children were still alive. They threw them in first and piled the dead on top. Legend says that so much blood soaked ...
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