Kirkus Reviews QR Code
BRIGHTON by Michael Harvey Kirkus Star

BRIGHTON

by Michael Harvey

Pub Date: June 21st, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-244297-0
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

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 successful—and ruthless—bookie. 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 family—from Kevin’s avaricious sister, Bridget, to the memory of their murdered grandmother—haunt 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.