Brighton by Michael Harvey - review

Nothing to do with Sodom-on-Sea, this Brighton is the patch of north-west Boston where Michael Harvey grew up. It’s where the slaughterhouses used to be — yet it’s mainly humans that get killed here.

Blood — black blood, Irish blood, bad blood — spill across the pages of this remarkable book. Talk about reeking revenge. “This place likes to eat its own,” says Bobby Scales. “And it’s always looking to be fed.”

Kevin — Harvey’s alter ego — first meets Bobby in 1971 on the banks of the Charles River, where he is putting an abused dog out of its misery: “Some things are just better off dead.” Kevin’s beloved grandmother has no sooner told him to trust no one but Bobby when she is slaughtered in her own kitchen. Instead of calling the cops the boys take matters into their own hands. A man dies.

Kevin, according to his grandmother, has “special” written all over him. The rest of his family — brutal father, harassed mother, sadistic older sister and soppy younger sister — do not. Only Kevin gets away — to follow a career in investigative journalism that culminates in a Pulitzer Prize — so that, 27 years later, he can ignore Bobby’s advice to never come back.