By Todd Robins /
In Michael Harvey’s vivid and riveting standalone crime novel, the prize-winning, middle-aged newspaper reporter Kevin Pearce has long been absent from his old Boston neighborhood of Brighton due to a morally compromising event from adolescence. Pearce escaped from Brighton and, at least on the surface, moved on, while friends and family stayed behind to replay the cunning karmic game.
Pearce’s friend Bobby Scales gets by as an operator in the Brighton criminal underbelly, where he employs several of Pearce’s other old friends and, come to find out, even his younger sister Bridget. All of these characters remain connected to a disturbing, unresolved past, a collective unconscious that might be categorized as Brighton. The title of Harvey’s novel, then, is not only a place but a state of mind, an ongoing undercurrent of trouble that pulls Pearce back in when he hears the ghosts are about. People keep turning up dead and it seems that Pearce’s old companions are implicated. Can the same be said of Pearce?
To tell this story, Harvey moves in and out of multiple character’s minds, giving up just enough of the goods to keep the reader guessing while richly depicting milieu. Brighton, with all of its treacherous aspects in the fictional sense, comes fully alive in the mind’s eye: A novel, a place, and a dream.
###
Todd Robins is the founder and editor of Vautrin.
This review first ran at Watermark Books & Café.
