Brighton

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.