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Summary
Summary
"The f**king bomb! I loved it." --Stephen King
"I couldn't stop reading." --John Grisham
A gritty and suspenseful Boston thriller for fans of Dennis Lehane and The Departed
An extraordinary thriller--gripping, haunting, and marvelously told--about two friends growing up in a rapidly changing Boston, who must face the sins of their past in the midst of a series of brutal murders.
"You came back here to bury your past. . . . Thing is, you gotta kill it first."
Kevin Pearce--baseball star, honor student, the pride of Brighton--was fifteen when he left town in the back of his uncle's cab. He and his buddy Bobby Scales had just committed heinous violence for what they thought were the best of reasons. Kevin didn't want a pass, but he was getting it anyway. Bobby would stay and face the music; Kevin's future would remain bright as ever. At least that was the way things were supposed to work, except in Brighton things never work the way they're supposed to.
Twenty-six years later, Kevin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Boston Globe. He's never been back to his old block, having avoided his family and, especially, Bobby Scales. Then he learns his old friend is the prime suspect in a string of local murders. Suddenly, Kevin's headed home--to protect a friend and the secret they share. To report this story to the end and protect those he loves, he must face not only an elusive, slippery killer, but his own corrupted conscience.
A powerhouse of a thriller, Brighton is a riveting and elegiac exploration of promises broken, debts owed, and old wrongs made right . . . no matter what the cost.
Author Notes
Michael Harvey is a writer, journalist, and documentary producer. He is the co-creator, writer and executive producer of the Prime Time Emmy-nominated television series Cold Case Files¿ and a former investigative producer for CBS in Chicago.
Harvey's work has won numerous national and international awards, including multiple Emmys and an Academy Award nomination for the Holocaust documentary Eyewitness.
Michael's novels include The Innocence Game, We All Fall Down, The Third Rail, The Fifth Floor, The Chicago Way, and The Governor's Wife.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This gritty standalone from Harvey (The Innocence Game) focuses on two childhood friends who have gone in dramatically different directions as adults. Kevin Pearce starts life as an intelligent young man born into poverty and a brutal home life in 1970s Brighton, a hard-bitten section of Boston. Kevin's best friend, Bobby Scales, is a violent urban Huck Finn who's also capable and loyal. After Kevin's grandmother is murdered in a grisly home invasion, Kevin and Bobby ambush and slay the killer. Twenty-seven years later, Kevin, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, discovers that the gun Bobby used to shoot his grandmother's killer is the same gun used in the recent murder of an undercover policewoman. Kevin searches for the connection, which reunites him with Bobby, now a tough Brighton bookie. Harvey crisply evokes the dark side of the Boston urban underclass inhabiting a fractured neighborhood in a constant state of casual violence and brutality. An intense, twist-filled climax caps the unremittingly gloomy but moving story. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Company. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A reporter returns to the violent Boston suburb of his youth when a series of murders appears linked to his past. Harvey (The Governor's Wife, 2015, etc.) leaves the Chicago of his series work behind and returns to the Brighton, Massachusetts, of his own youth, lending its crime-ridden streets to the fictional Kevin Pearce and Bobby Scales, childhood friends bound by a secret act of violence that forced Kevin to leave the neighborhood at 15. Now an investigative reporter for the Boston Globe who just won a Pulitzer Prize for a series he did on a black man unfairly convicted of the murder of a local woman named Rosie Tallent, Kevin hasn't been back to Brighton in 25 years. But thanks to the inside scoop from his DA girlfriend, he hears about the murder of an undercover cop in the old neighborhood and evidence that ties her murder both to the crime that drove Kevin away over two decades ago and to Bobby. Everything and nothing has changed in racially charged Brighton as Kevin revisits old haunts, looking for his friend, who's become the neighborhood's most successfuland ruthlessbookie. Harvey changes points of view as easily as his characters load clips into their guns, and we see the story unfold from multiple angles, blurring the definition of criminal from the get-go. The members of the Pearce familyfrom Kevin's avaricious sister, Bridget, to the memory of their murdered grandmotherhaunt the narrative and are as much forces as the present-day murders and Kevin's drive to uncover Bobby's possible involvement. Sharp as the blades used to gut the guilty and innocent alike, Harvey's fierce stand-alone is a blood-soaked tribute to finding your past and living with the consequences. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Despite Thomas Wolfe's admonition against going home again, Kevin Pearce decides to do just that. He left Boston's Brighton neighborhood at 15 on the run from a crime he committed with his friend Bobby Scales and never went back. Twenty-six years later, Bobby, who stayed behind, has become a seasoned criminal. Kevin is a Pulitzer-winning journalist. He decides to revisit Brighton and is drawn into a string of local murders when Bobby is named the prime suspect. What follows is a masterful piece of crime fiction with a gritty atmosphere, extraordinary characters, and several stunning twists. The tension is there at the start, but the action takes a while to get going after an extensive opening narrative about Kevin's childhood; in fact, the very beginning might have been better placed later in the story. Harvey's six previous novels were set in Chicago, but Boston is his hometown and he renders it in minute detail. Strongly recommended for fans of Dennis Lehane and readers looking for something like Peter May.--Murphy, Jane Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HOME IS THE ONE PLACE on earth you can't fix - but don't tell Ace Atkins's straight-arrow hero, Quinn Colson. When he returned to Mississippi after serving 10 years as an Army Ranger, he found Tibbehah County infested with strip joints and meth labs, bogus preachers and vicious bikers, crooked politicians and marauding gangsters. Now, in THE INNOCENTS (Putnam, $27), the sixth book in this series, Quinn has been voted out as sheriff, but he's still trying to make things right. Some familiar good ol' boys turn up here, including Quinn's father, a burnt-out Hollywood stuntman with a delusional scheme to open a dude ranch. But although this is a novel fueled by testosterone and moonshine, three of its best characters are women. Lillie Virgil has been acting sheriff since the last person to hold that office "got himself killed." But although she's admired for her keen marksmanship and filthy vocabulary, she may have met her match when Fannie Hathcock takes over the old Booby Trap, renames it Vienna's Place and establishes a somewhat more genteel atmosphere in which to buy a lap dance. A shrewd businesswoman, Fannie uses the Golden Cherry Motel, across the street, as a dorm for the Born Losers, the "dirty, stinky and mean" biker gang that provides protection for her club. But it's 18-year-old Milly Jones who grabs your heart. Determined to tell the shameful story behind her brother's suicide, she needs someone to help tell it right. This poor innocent even drives all the way to Tupelo to attend a book signing by a "real" writer, only to come away with a quick brushoff and a Christian romance novel. To raise a nest egg, Milly signs on as a pole dancer at Vienna's Place and, drawing on her gymnastic skill as a former cheerleader, the kid is a sensation. But she's so desperate to get out of town that she grabs her money, stiffs Fannie out of the house share and heads for the highway. When Milly resurfaces - weaving down a country road while engulfed in flames - the narrative understandably gets darker, challenging Lillie and Quinn to break through the community's rigid defenses and twisted loyalties. But the deeply cynical ending only confirms Milly's observation that "people around here hate when you tell the truth." "YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN in this game." Peter Lovesey gives fair warning in ANOTHER ONE GOES TONIGHT (Soho Crime, $27.95), his latest impeccably constructed mystery featuring the unpredictable but ever-entertaining Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath Constabulary. Diamond is on the scene of a car crash near a railroad line when he rescues a severely injured old man, thrown from what appears to be a custom-built tricycle. This peculiar person, it is later revealed, is a retired engineer and an ardent railroad buff, a member of a breakaway branch of the Bath Railway Society. Things get interesting when Diamond discovers that other elderly members of the group have recently died, leading him to suspect that he might have saved the life of a serial killer. Lest we get too focused on all the funny business involved in railroad mania, there are red herrings to sniff out and misdirections to blindly follow. For all the witty jabs Lovesey takes at English eccentricities, this is a classic whodunit. As Diamond notes, "Taken as problem solving, plotting a murder could be treated like any other engineering project, constructing a turbine or a tunnel." The same might be said of deconstructing a good murder mystery. EACH OF MARTIN WALKER'S novels set in the Dordogne highlights some feature peculiar to this beautiful pastoral region of France. Previous plots turned on the annual truffle auction in Ste. Alvère; the prehistoric limestone caves along the Vézère River; and the grape harvest in the fictional village of St. Denis, where the amiable Bruno Courrèges serves as chief of police. In FATAL PURSUIT (Knopf, $25.95), the colorful attraction is the Concours d'Élégance, a vintage car parade and sports car rally to be held in St. Denis. Through a comedy of errors, Bruno is recruited as navigator of a classic Citroën DS3 in the rally, which is both thrilling and truly élégante. The barely noticeable murder of a local historian eventually folds into the more dramatic mystery of "the most expensive car of all time," a 1936 Type 57C Bugatti - one of only four built, but gone missing somewhere in France during World War II. For the first time, Walker has created an object of desire more delectable than the festive meals Bruno always prepares for his friends. TWO BOYS GROW up poor on the side streets of a big city. One manages to climb his way out of the old neighborhood; the other stays behind to make their tough city tougher. Michael Harvey does wonders with this standard opener in BRIGHTON (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99), which finds him back in his native Boston. Kevin Pearce and Bobby Scales share a terrible secret from their past that Kevin is forced to confront years later, as a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, when a murder investigation takes him back home to face his old friend Bobby - and his own conscience. The story is boldly told, from so many angles and points of view that the moral center keeps shifting. Even the characters who die won't go away in this fiercely felt lament for a neighborhood and a youth that never was.
Library Journal Review
After a series of novels featuring Chicago-based private investigator Michael Kelly (most recently The Governor's Wife), Harvey sets this riveting stand-alone in his native Boston. Reporter Kevin Pearce, who has just won a Pulitzer Prize with the Boston Globe, returns to his hometown of Brighton for the first time since a teenage act of violence forced him to flee. In 1975, he and his friend Bobby Scales tracked down and killed a man Kevin saw running from the scene of a gruesome robbery that left his grandmother dead and his younger sister badly injured. Bobby took the heat and became the neighborhood's most feared bookie, allowing Kevin to embark on the path of career respectability. But a quarter-century later, Bobby is now the prime suspect in a rash of murders involving Brighton's seedy underworld, and Kevin will have to reckon with his long-buried past in a way that will test his allegiances-to his childhood friend, to his prosecutor girlfriend, and even to his sister, who is harboring secrets of her own. VERDICT Harvey's gritty tribute to the working-class neighborhoods of his youth is as authentically captured as the best of -Dennis Lehane. Fans of Martin Scorsese's film The Departed will love the violent twists and turns of the novel's final chapters.[See Prepub Alert, 12/21/15.]-Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.