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Bleedout: A Novel |  |
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Bleedout: A Novel | |
The victim : An invincible attorney.
Hugh Freyl, the scion of the richest and most influential family in Springfield, Illinois, is found beaten to death in the library of his own law firm.
The suspect : A convicted killer.
David Marion, a young man from the inner city, is on parole. It was Freyl who, to the outrage of colleagues, family, and friends, orchestrated his release from prison. And it was Freyl who took David in as his protégé, giving him a second chance at life. Were Freyl's critics right to suspect David's murderous nature all along? Or was Freyl, a blind man who could always see the truth in others, not all he appeared to be? As David fights to prove his innocence, a twisted world of darkness and deception unfolds.
作者简介 Joan Brady was the first woman--and the only American--to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, which she was awarded for her second novel, Theory of War. It also won France's coveted Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger. Brady is the author of short stories; an autobiography, The Unmaking of a Dancer; and the novels Death Comes for Peter Pan and The Emigre. Brady was born in California and danced with the New York City Ballet before attending Columbia University. She lives in Oxford, England.
编辑推荐 From Publishers Weekly
Whitbread Award–winning novelist Brady (Theory of War) has crafted an action-packed, densely woven thriller set in Springfield, Ill., about a blind attorney and the young man who may or may not have murdered him. David Marion, 33, who spent his teens and 20s in prison for the murder of his foster brother and foster father, is now the prime suspect in the brutal murder of Hugh Freyl, the lawyer who reformed Marion in prison. As a trusting relationship blossomed between the two men, Hugh realized how smart, decent—and innocent—David really was; the story of their friendship is told in flashbacks. At the start of the present-day narrative, "gate-crasher" David ducks into Freyl's funeral tent to pay his respects, much to the horror of the other guests, mostly condescending high society types like Hugh's mother, Becky. But as Hugh and his personal assistant Stephanie Willis had discovered before Hugh's death, David was probably never a killer. More digging reveals prison torture, child abuse and serious flaws in the original case against David. Meanwhile, positive evidence proves David had nothing to do with Hugh's death, and he shifts into fierce detective mode with Stephanie's help and some cash incentive from shifty Becky, discovering "overcultivated orchards of corporate fraud" within Hugh's slick law firm. After Stephanie and David sift through several backstabbing crooks, the real killer is flushed out at the conclusion of this satisfying if somewhat long-winded novel. Agent, George Lucas. $100,000 ad/promo. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
"A gripping page-turner...psychologically insightful and deeply moving." -- Jeffery Deaver
"A tense, dense, spiraling story...spellbinding...a master class in suspense." -- Val McDermid, author of The Distant Echo
"Like Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, this is much more than a can't-put-it-down thriller." -- Library Journal, starred review
文摘 Chapter 1
But why did he kill them?
Try as I might, I cannot find an answer that satisfies me. Stephanie assures me that I would understand if I could see him, but I've been blind for a quarter of a century. I cannot make out as much as a man's outline in full sun. And yet even on the first day I met him, he gave off a sense of threat as soon as he entered the room. He was only a boy then, a couple of months short of sixteen, and already a multiple murderer who would have been on death row if not for his age. That could hardly be it, though. I was used to murderers. I knew the rattle-clank of chains and leg irons.
The more I think about it, the more I think it must have been the way he breathed; I swear I could hear his fury at the very oxygen that gave him life as he took it into his lungs and let it go. The Chernobyl meltdown had dominated the radio for almost a week, and I remember thinking, "Rage is the nuclear core that powers the boy."
All this intensity failed to tell me why he killed them. It still does.
Twenty years of living with the question, and now I find myself in the absurd situation of a man about to be murdered--without the hope of my answer first.
A truck approached along Route 97 out of Springfield, Illinois, going toward Petersburg. A slanting, bleak, early-morning sun shone, but there was no warmth in it. This part of America is fiercely cold in winter. The truck slowed as it passed through the gates of Oakland Cemetery and hit the buckled road that is never repaired until spring, then continued over a small rise ringed round with naked winter branches. Papaws grow here, larch and beech too, and the south fork of the Sangamon River is almost close enough to see.
This is one of the most famous burial places in the country. It's the site of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology and the grave of Ann Rutledge, beloved of Abraham Lincoln, "wedded to him," as Masters's poem on
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