A Matthew Scudder novel, Block takes us back in time to Matt's early days, when he stops drinking and spends a least a part of each day at AA. Here he meets an old friend from his childhood; he's an ex hood, cleaned his life up and wants to atone for his past misdeeds. In so doing, he ends up compromising an old thief/killer who, because he's afraid of these attempts to tell and atone for past crimes, ends up killing Matt's friend. Of course, Matt has to find out who killed his old friend, ends up leaving a few corpses during his journey to find the killer, breaks up with his girl friend, finds another, and the novel ends up satisfying neither the reader nor Matt as he ends up compromising with the killer, letting him live though threatening him with evidence should he ever decide to kill Matt. It's worth reading mostly for the characters in the novel, not the story itself, and I have to admit I got tired of his AA meetings, the friends he met there, all who have had often sordid pasts. I have not read Block in a while so it was fun to drop into his and Matt Scudder's world, the most recent of Block's novels by he way.
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