Down River

Down River, by John Hart, won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel, and in one way it's easy to see why. The book is well-written, the characters are vivid, and the story is well-constructed, with the solution not readily apparent. But in some ways this book was a real chore, and I only finished out of a sense of duty.

The first-person narration is by Adam Chase, a young man who left his North Carolina town after being acquitted of murder charges. Everyone thought he was guilty, including his stepmother, who testified against him. This created a wedge between himself and his father, so he went to New York and had not been back until a call from an old man compelled him to return. Once there he found a lot of the old resentment, but hooked up with an old girlfriend, a police officer. But then the daughter of a family friend, now a ripe teenager, is viciously beaten, and the friend that called Adam turns out dead, and the local sheriff looks at Adam suspiciously. Meanwhile locals are pressuring Adam's father to sell his considerable acreage to nuclear power plant, and just who was that mysterious woman in the canoe?

The big problem I had with this book was Adam himself. He is, to put it bluntly, a prick. He's supposed to be, mind you, but he was not a pleasure to spend time with, and there were times I looked at this book and just couldn't pick it up again. Adam is almost angry, because of the estrangement from his father, and the suicide of his mother when he was a child, and as such he's constantly telling people what to do and riling in no time flat. Many times while reading this I wanted to slap him silly. I've never cottoned to characters in mysteries who find evidence but then conceal it from the police even though it doesn't make much sense. In the movies it's called the "idiot plot."

The other problem is that the book leans to the literary style, and at times veers close to self-parody. There are loads of instances where we get terse, one-sentence paragraphs like this:

"They showed up two hours later.
My father.
My stepmother."

Or:

"Not now.
Not ever.
Smoke hung in the room. Grace cried out.
And my father wept for the fourth time in his life."

It takes a lot of moxie to actually type something like that and turn it in. And Adam is making all sorts of discoveries about himself that seem painfully obvious to the rest of us.

Books with obnoxious narrators can be successful, and I'm not quite sure why this one wasn't. It would have been a much better read in the third-person.