|
It's been kind of hard to get a handle on Reed Arvin, at least until recently. He's written a how-to book dealing with the music industry, an inspirational work, and a low-key, beautiful novel titled THE WILL. None of the foregoing offered any clue to THE LAST GOODBYE, Arvin's first entry in the suspense genre. THE LAST GOODBYE was contemporaneously a character study, a morality tale and, at rock bottom, a mystery --- complex, fine and true, meticulously plotted and wonderfully told. As good a book as THE LAST GOODBYE was, however, it was just a foreshadowing of the heights that Arvin has achieved with BLOOD OF ANGELS.
THE LAST GOODBYE was set in Atlanta, and Arvin made the city as much of a character as any person in the book. He continues this practice in BLOOD OF ANGELS, which takes place in Nashville, Arvin's city of residence. It is clear that Arvin knows Nashville with an intimacy that is at once pleasurable and painful. It is a town of quiet, subtle intrigue, of promise and pain, where a kiss on the cheek and a knife to the back both can be delivered with a smile and cordiality unmatched elsewhere. Arvin captures this spirit quite nicely. But his main protagonist is Thomas Dennehy, senior District Attorney for Davidson County. Dennehy's first person, present tense narration provides a knife's edge immediacy for his tale.
Dennehy, a good, honest and decent man, is given the task of prosecuting Moses Bol, a Sudanese refugee charged with the murder of a white woman in the Nations. The Nations is an area of Nashville populated by downtrodden whites; Bol lives in Tennessee Village, a complex bordering on The Nations filled with Sudanese. Relations between the residents of these two areas, already tense, threaten to boil over as the trial approaches. The outcome of the trial becomes all but certain until two events occur. A beautiful minister and death penalty activist is ready to provide an alibi for Bol on the night of the murder. Meanwhile, a university professor, an activist with a penchant for bread and circus audiences, comes forth with what he claims is evidence that Dennehy sent the wrong man to Death Row in a capital punishment case tried several years previously.
The accusation rocks the District Attorney's office, and Dennehy, to the core. Yet Dennehy is unaware that both cases are going to challenge him in ways he never thought possible on both a professional and personal level, and that a dark and shadowy figure from his past --- all but forgotten --- is about to seek retribution and revenge against Dennehy and all who he holds dear.
Reed Arvin is a marvel, pure and simple. BLOOD OF ANGELS has enough intrigue and suspense for three novels, yet it never feels crammed or unduly compressed. Arvin provides what is perhaps the fairest, most balanced discourse on capital punishment I've encountered, while at the same time he populates his story with characters who the reader will honestly care about, and wonder about, when the tale is told. I was reminded of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in some ways, PRESUMED INNOCENT in others; BLOOD OF ANGELS will sit on my annual reading shelf with both of them. Highest possible recommendation.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
 Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
© Copyright 1996-2008, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
