Down River

Adam Chase left Rowan County, North Carolina, with an acquittal instead of an absolution: tried for the death of a local boy and acquitted even though his own stepmother took the stand against him, he walked out of the courtroom into a town that had already voted guilty, and a family that half agreed. Five years of New York exile later, a phone call from his oldest friend pulls him home, to the river farm his family has held for generations, and to a county at war with itself: a power company wants the riverfront land for a plant, the payout would remake every farm on the water, and Adam's father is the lone significant holdout, which makes the Chase land the pivot of other people's fortunes.

Hart runs the homecoming noir at full boil. Within days of Adam's return the violence starts, a beating here, a body there, each one adjacent enough to Adam to reopen the old verdict, and the county's memory does the prosecution's work: the acquitted man as standing suspect, convenient to every faction. The investigation he is forced to run in self defence descends through the family's own strata, the stepmother whose turn against him on the witness stand sealed his exile, the surrogate siblings raised on the farm, his father's iron and failing stewardship, and the land deal's quiet corruptions, toward secrets the trial never touched.

The river itself carries the book, rendered with the particular love of a native writing his home ground.

Around three hundred and forty pages.

Best for readers who want Southern gothic suspense with the family and the land as co conspirators, and revelation managed like river current.