Crime & Beyond Reads John Hart

The Denver-based book club Crime & Beyond just read a book by one of their favorite authors, John Hart. Kerry Hammond is here to tell us what the club thought about the book.

This month Crime & Beyond met to discuss John Hart’s latest book Redemption Road. Hart is one of our favorite authors and we have read and discussed almost every book he has written. His books never fail to create a wonderful book club discussion and we were not disappointed with his latest.

Redemption Road was a story about, well, redemption. But whose redemption, you might ask. Well, therein lay the discussion. The book’s Amazon description is as follows: Imagine: A boy with a gun waits for the man who killed his mother. A troubled detective confronts her past in the aftermath of a brutal shooting. After thirteen years in prison, a good cop walks free as deep in the forest, on the altar of an abandoned church, a body cools in pale linen…This is a town on the brink. This is Redemption Road.

There is no doubt that Hart is an excellent writer, and our club members gave his latest book extremely high scores. Many times you read a book that has a great plot but uninteresting characters, or vice versa. Hart is able to not only make his characters come alive on the page, but he writes an extremely suspenseful plot that keeps the reader turning each page until the wee hours.

As much as Hart’s books have a sense of place, we noticed that the setting in Redemption Road seemed slightly less important in the scheme of things. It really could have been any small town USA, the characters and situation were what mattered—the setting holding a secondary position.

Next month we will be discussing Ink and Bone by Lisa Unger.