Brighton

April 18, 2016
This gritty standalone from Harvey (The Innocence Game) focuses on two childhood friends who have gone in dramatically different directions as adults. Kevin Pearce starts life as an intelligent young man born into poverty and a brutal home life in 1970s Brighton, a hard-bitten section of Boston. Kevin’s best friend, Bobby Scales, is a violent urban Huck Finn who’s also capable and loyal. After Kevin’s grandmother is murdered in a grisly home invasion, Kevin and Bobby ambush and slay the killer. Twenty-seven years later, Kevin, now a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, discovers that the gun Bobby used to shoot his grandmother’s killer is the same gun used in the recent murder of an undercover policewoman. Kevin searches for the connection, which reunites him with Bobby, now a tough Brighton bookie. Harvey crisply evokes the dark side of the Boston urban underclass inhabiting a fractured neighborhood in a constant state of casual violence and brutality. An intense, twist-filled climax caps the unremittingly gloomy but moving story. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Company.

Starred review from April 15, 2016

After a series of novels featuring Chicago-based private investigator Michael Kelly (most recently The Governor's Wife), Harvey sets this riveting stand-alone in his native Boston. Reporter Kevin Pearce, who has just won a Pulitzer Prize with the Boston Globe, returns to his hometown of Brighton for the first time since a teenage act of violence forced him to flee. In 1975, he and his friend Bobby Scales tracked down and killed a man Kevin saw running from the scene of a gruesome robbery that left his grandmother dead and his younger sister badly injured. Bobby took the heat and became the neighborhood's most feared bookie, allowing Kevin to embark on the path of career respectability. But a quarter-century later, Bobby is now the prime suspect in a rash of murders involving Brighton's seedy underworld, and Kevin will have to reckon with his long-buried past in a way that will test his allegiances--to his childhood friend, to his prosecutor girlfriend, and even to his sister, who is harboring secrets of her own. VERDICT Harvey's gritty tribute to the working-class neighborhoods of his youth is as authentically captured as the best of Dennis Lehane. Fans of Martin Scorsese's film The Departed will love the violent twists and turns of the novel's final chapters.[See Prepub Alert, 12/21/15.]--Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2016
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.

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Starred review from April 1, 2016
Despite Thomas Wolfe's admonition against going home again, Kevin Pearce decides to do just that. He left Boston's Brighton neighborhood at 15on the run from a crime he committed with his friend Bobby Scalesand never went back. Twenty-six years later, Bobby, who stayed behind, has become a seasoned criminal. Kevin is a Pulitzer-winning journalist. He decides to revisit Brighton and is drawn into a string of local murders when Bobby is named the prime suspect. What follows is a masterful piece of crime fiction with a gritty atmosphere, extraordinary characters, and several stunning twists. The tension is there at the start, but the action takes a while to get going after an extensive opening narrative about Kevin's childhood; in fact, the very beginning might have been better placed later in the story. Harvey's six previous novels were set in Chicago, but Boston is his hometown and he renders it in minute detail. Strongly recommended for fans of Dennis Lehane and readers looking for something like Peter May.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)