THE REDEMPTION OF BOBBY LOVE

An escaped convict tells how he hid his prison break from his wife and others until the authorities busted him decades later.

By most outward appearances, Bobby Love was a good father and husband—a hardworking and unpretentious man who taught Sunday school, coached his sons’ teams, and went to parent-teacher conferences. Then, in 2015, the NYPD and FBI raided his apartment; as his stunned wife watched, they arrested him for an armed robbery he had committed more than 40 years earlier in North Carolina. In alternating chapters in this stranger-than-fiction but largely believable dual memoir, the Loves recall their pre- and post-raid lives and how Bobby earned parole and a measure of redemption after the media publicized his case. Born Walter Miller in 1950, Bobby was raised by a single mother after his abusive father died when he was 9. As a teenager, he robbed credit unions at gunpoint partly because “I still had no image of myself leading an honest life. I had no idea what that would look like.” Imprisoned for one of his heists, he jumped off a road-crew bus and fled to New York. He took a new name, married Cheryl, and often worked two jobs to support his family, getting up at 4 a.m. to take a subway from Brooklyn to a job in the Bronx. When the law finally caught up with him, he was an ailing 64-year-old who faced the possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars. That he won his freedom owes much to Cheryl’s love and faith in his basic goodness and to his apparently sincere regrets and efforts to go straight. A hopeful message (“stay positive and focused”) and simple and direct storytelling should give this book a strong crossover appeal for the young adult market.

A warmhearted story of an ex-con’s long and winding road to an honest life.