Not another thriller about a disaffected Southern lawyer? Yes, but one written with passion and complexity. Jackson Workman Pickens is drifting in the wake of his father, a wealthy lawyer who has been missing for 18 months. On most days, he's ambivalent about being a lawyer; on the days when he hates it, the hatred is so deep he thinks something is seriously wrong with him. Flawed and weak, he's married to a woman chosen by his father, a woman who spends too much time at the country club, "pretending we were rich, happy, or both." He still sometimes sees Vanessa, the woman he's always loved, but whom he abandoned. He's estranged from his sister Jean, who suffers from the trauma of a bitter divorce, several suicide attempts, their mother's death and father's disappearance. She, in turn, calls Work their father's monkey boy. His life is a mess, and his father's body has just been discovered.
When he goes to the site and sees the pale and curving bones beneath rotting fabric, he feels "the return of a long-quiescent rage, and the certain conviction that this was the most human my father had ever appeared to me." Work wants to discover the truth about the murder, but worries about what it might tell him about his sister; however, he soon becomes the prime suspect and must find answers. As he searches, he is forced to strip away layers of deceit and misunderstanding.
Along the way he drops illusions ("[his wife] laughed in a way that made her suddenly ugly, and I knew that hope would change nothing."), but gains reality. This is classic damaged family territory, but John Hart navigates it well, and has written an outstanding first novel. --Marilyn Dahl