Down River, by John Hart

I wish I’d written this earlier when both the book and the book club meeting were fresh in my mind!

The main character is Adam Chase, and the book opens with Adam going home, to North Carolina. He talks a little about why he’s going home, and why he left in the first place, but the author is also careful to not just lay everything out for you in the first few pages. Through the rest of the book you learn why he left (he was accused of murder, held on trial [with his own stepmother as star witness] and acquitted, but the town still felt like he’d gotten away with murder so his father basically threw him out), and why he came back (an old friend called him for help and once the idea of going back was put in his head he couldn’t shake it).

This book is a soap opera, only not as retarded. You’ve got a town torn apart by big land deal that could leave some people very rich, and a family torn apart by secrets, lies, suicide, murder, and one bitch of a stepmother.

The stepmother was my least favorite character. Or maybe most favorite, if you consider it a “love to hate” thing. Here are my problems with her: (this is a huge spoiler) she testifies against her stepson in his murder trial. She is the only eye-witness, but all she saw was a dude covered in blood walking away from where the body was later discovered. Throughout the book, we give her the benefit of doubt: she saw a dude, but it wasn’t Adam. She *believes* it was Adam, but I know he didn’t kill that boy! I do not think that she is actively lying; only that she is mistaken. Somewhere in the book the bitch even manages a snooty “Well, I guess this makes me a liar, then!” And at that point I believed that *she* believed he killed the guy. When Adam finally demands to talk to her, she gets all mad, like he has no right to a conversation with her in the house that was *his* before it was hers, she acts like she doesn’t owe him anything, won’t admit to him that maybe she was mistaken, and then bitch slaps him! Still, I thought that she was just a bitch who’d made a mistake.

But finally, at the end, you find out she knew all along Adam had nothing to do with it, she was covering for her own child—and I’m pretty sure that’s when I actually said the words “oh, you bitch!” out loud. Sometimes I wish I could reach into a book and smack the characters around a bit, because she totally deserved it.

The only thing I didn’t like about the book was how the author kept describing everyone’s anger. Because EVERYONE in this book was an angry little ball of anger, I had to read sentence after sentence about how sometime was all “angry, hard lines” or “by the time he’d turned back to me he’d composed his face, but the anger was there, just under the surface”. These are not exact quotes because I’ve already forgotten exact lines.

It was an okay book. Not awesome enough for me to gush over, but not terrible, (haha). And we had one of our best book club discussions (in my opinion) so it totally gets high marks for that.