Reviews
'Johnny learned early that there was no safe place, not the backyard or the playground, not the front porch or the quiet road that grazed the edge of town. No safe place, and no one to protect you. Childhood was an illusion.' So begins John Hart's grimly masterful The Last Child. Seldom, if ever, has an entire book been better encapsulated in its opening lines. A fitting start since The Last Child is one of the best thrillers of the year. Hart's third tome, building on the success of The King of Lies and Down River, firmly anoints him as this generation's Pat Conroy, a master of melancholy and often empty quests. This particular quest, as undertaken by troubled 13-year-old Johnny Merrimon, is for his twin sister Alyssa who went missing the year before. Johnny scours the town day and night, on bicycle and in car, making notations on a map and spying on convicted sex offenders living on the fringe of both the town and humanity. Along the way he's aided by his trusty and equally tortured friend Jack and, later, by a hulking mysterious stranger lugging around a box with who-knows-what inside. This as he's pursued by kindly police detective Clyde Hunt, who's equally determined to find Alyssa. 'That's what sustained him,' Hart writes of Johnny's plight, 'thoughts of salvation and the past, hot pleas for revenge.' Think Huck Finn goes to hell. And, just as the trail Twain's signature creation takes with the runaway slave Jim along the Mississippi turns dark and scary, Johnny's trail just keeps getting darker and scarier through the steamy woods of North Carolina. Ultimately, it leads him to a ring of child killers and abusers, succeeding where the police have failed while his mother sinks deeper and deeper into the morass of alcohol and drugs. Johnny has only Clyde Hunt to help and understand him, but Hunt's got demons of his own. No, The Last Child isn't a happy story, the title indicative of the end of innocence as we know it, if it ever existed at all. Hart tackles this down and difficult theme with a more somber aplomb than Ray Bradbury in Something Wicked This Way Comes or Robert R. McCammon in his wonderful Boy's Life. Unlike those, though, The Last Child is also a terrific mystery chock full of twists, turns and red herrings as the truth behind Alyssa's disappearance becomes clear in a denouement that offers some degree of hope, however jaded. Many books strive to build complex mythologies into their tales. Hart, instead, ambitiously sets out to debunk the greatest mythology of all: childhood itself. A study in reverse literary engineering, his is a brilliant vision beautifully realized., John Hart's The Last Child is a rare accomplishment--a compelling, fast-paced thriller written with a masterful, literary touch. You'll feel this story as much in your heart as in your gut., There are few books published that can legitimately be called a 'must-read,' but this is one of them., Sometimes, early success can be a curse for a writer....That's definitely not the case with North Carolina's John Hart...With Down River ...he's only gotten better., ... The Last Child is also a terrific mystery chock full of twists, turns and red herrings as the truth behind Alyssa's disappearance becomes clear in a denouement that offers some degree of hope, however jaded. Many books strive to build complex mythologies into their tales. Hart, instead, ambitiously sets out to debunk the greatest mythology of all: childhood itself. A study in reverse literary engineering, his is a brilliant vision beautifully realized., If you value Harper Lee, James Lee Burke, Truman Capote, and Michael Malone... it's time to add John Hart to your bookshelves., This book should settle once and for all the question of whether thrillers and mysteries can also be literature., Hart artfully employs the pattern of a whodunit to lead the reader down a twisted, thrilling path. What lies at the end, though, is wholly unexpected. There is no easy solution to this story, as we are asked to contemplate the senselessness of fate and the sacrifices some people are willing to make for their families. With the deft characterization of any good work of literary fiction and the subtle, satisfying plotting of a favorite mystery, The Last Child brings readers deep into the pathos of a small North Carolina community. This page turner will stay in your mind long after you've read the final page., Hart...is brilliant in the art of misdirection...But his attention to language and tempo, his descriptions of settings and people, and his development of characters and their personal relationships all add a wonderful richness to his work. It is a richness that should make The Last Child a pleasure for any reader., A year and a day have passed since the abduction of 12-year-old Alyssa Merrimon, and her twin brother, Johnny, has never felt more alone. His father abandoned the family soon after the disappearance, and his mother has all but vanished into a haze of drinking, drugs and abusive sex. The police detective who investigated the case hovers over the remnants of the family like a watchful angel, but his attentions are unwelcome; he hasn't found the girl. In fact, Johnny's only true friend is his frail young classmate Jack, and even he wavers between supporting Johnny's faith that Alyssa's alive and knowing that she's gone forever. But then a clue falls from the sky -- literally: A biker hit by a car and thrown from a bridge lands almost at Johnny's feet. 'I found her,' he says in his dying words. 'The girl that was taken.' John Hart's third novel covers only a few days in the life of a North Carolina town, but the minutes all seem breathless. Every few chapters bring new twists and startling revelations: another girl's disappearance, bodies and then more bodies, a surprising series of connections that casts new light on everything that's come before and throws darkening shadows over what's ahead. The young boy at the story's center is a magnificent creation, Huck Finn channeled through Lord of the Flies, and as a detective in his own right he proves as driven and passionate as any mystery fan could hope for. Along the way, the author returns to the central themes of his first two novels -- class divisions and the bonds of family -- but with a broader scope, delving with grace and empathy into the inner lives of characters across a wide spectrum: policemen balancing the personal and the professional, an escaped convict who hears the voice of God, troubled children growing up too fast, parents undone by grief. And where those earlier novels -- even his Edgar Award-winning Down River -- seemed mired in frequent melodrama, this new book strips away the more overt sentimentality and proves all the more poignant and heartbreaking. Hart is still far too young for The Last Child to be called a crowning achievement, but the novel's ambition, emotional breadth and maturity make it an early masterpiece in a career that continues to promise great things., With his best novel yet, the Edgar Award-winning Hart ( Down River ) firmly cements his place alongside the greats of the genre., Hart once again produces a novel that is elegant, haunting, and memorable. His characters are given an emotional depth that genre characters seldom have, and the graceful, evocative prose lifts his stories right out of their genre and into the realm of capital-L literature. A must-read for every variety of fiction reader., Be warned: the young hero of this compelling read will break your heart. The Last Child is one of those books that stays with readers long after the last page is turned., Hart's third novel, The Last Child , surpasses its superb predecessors. The Last Child 's atmospheric, hard-boiled story allows Hart to delve into a town's sinister secrets with a complex tale of broken families, despair and hope., John Hart is already much praised, but his third and most complex psychological thriller is a risk which has paid off with that same unshakeable sense of discovery. The risk lay in the rarely attempted feat of writing a convincing child hero for adults. His success injects extra poignancy into an already compelling blend of southern gothic mock-epic, outright horror and dues-paying whodunnit. This one stays with you ., In his third novel, Edgar-winner Hart confronts murder, depravity, betrayal and the like, while still finding room for tenderness., Hart is still far too young for The Last Child to be called a crowning achievement, but the novel's ambition, emotional breadth and maturity make it an early masterpiece in a career that continues to promise great things., The Last Child is a beautifully written, gripping story that will have you staying up late, torn between a desire to know what happens and a reluctance to get to the book's end and break the spell. But don't worry: The characters will stay vividly alive in your imagination long after you've raced through the pages., The missing-child story has been done so often that it takes something extraordinary to make it rise above the commonplace. And that is what John Hart has accomplished in his third novel, The Last Child . In the end, this is a novel about blood--the blood of life and death, the blood of kin, the blood of the past. And Hart has again brought forth a mystery/thriller that surpasses the humdrum and rises to serious literature.
