“Loehfelm joins the ranks of our finest literary crime novelists, his first two books deserving of a place on the shelf beside the best of Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos.” - from the AP review of BLOODROOT.

BLOODROOT

the new “brilliantly ambitious” thriller

Now available

Starred review for BLOODROOT, from Booklist:

Staten Island history professor Kevin Curran feels responsible for the loss of his wild younger brother, Danny. He doesn’t know if Danny is alive or dead; he simply knows that he disappeared three years before into the netherworld of New York City’s drug addicts. When Danny reappears, healthy and apparently prosperous, Kevin is overjoyed, but Danny soon lets Kevin in on some very dark secrets. Eventually,

Kevin finds himself shaken to his diffident core by the things he does out of filial loyalty. Like Fresh Kills (2008), Loehfelm’s highly praised debut, Bloodroot bursts the boundary of the crime genre. There’s plenty of crime, but the book is also an insightful psychological tale of family; loss and love; tragedies, past and imminent; and redemption. Staten Island, the least-celebrated of New York’s boroughs, becomes a dark, mysterious, and portentous place in Loehfelm’s often-elegant prose. All the major characters are strikingly realized and won’t soon be forgotten. Nor will readers forget Bloodroot, a hospital for children with mental and physical disabilities that Loehfelm patterned on Staten Island’s real-life Willowbrook Hospital, where the neglect and abuse patients suffered for several decades made horrific headlines in the 1970s.

Bloodroot deserves to be a breakout best-seller for its talented author.

— Thomas Gaughan

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