The Reckoning Book

George James and Freeman Hawk were unlikely friends. George was part of soft-spoken, old-money Richmond; Freeman came from a hardscrabble country family mired in poverty and marked by violence. Fate threw them together long ago as freshman roommates at New Hope College. It was the late '60s, and George was the standard-bearer for a society living on borrowed time while Freeman was leading the charge into what came next. Before they left New Hope, though, Freeman would convert George, convince him that there was a better world to be made, persuade him-temporarily-to forsake the seamless life that already was mapped out for him as the Ham Prince of Richmond. Canada. The option to war- bloodied America, beckoned. The moment of truth came in a small town on the Vermont border, where George James lost his faith in Freeman Hawk-or perhaps in himself-and hesitated. Fast-forward to the early twenty-first century, in a world whose axis has been tilted by 9/11. George and his son Jake, are existing in a shaky approximation of normalcy, nursing the wounds of their own, personal loss as George negotiates the sale of the family business and Jake, plunged into despair and rage by his mother's death, is consigned to a private school for "troubled" teens. Things get dicier when Freeman Hawk reappears. Nothing about him is as it seems, not even his name. Freeman is on the run, but from what? In Howard Owen's ninth novel, old scabs are torn off and new wounds inflicted. In the end there will be a reckoning for all of them, and sixteen-yearold Jake James will find himself at a border as daunting as the one from which his father turned back so long ago.

Publishers Weekly

Owen (Rock of Ages) offers parallel coming-of-age stories in this hardheaded look at two very different eras. In Richmond, Va., in 2004, 16-year-old Jake James is still dealing with his mother's recent death, his first serious love affair, and his girlfriend's jealous and menacing ex-boyfriend when Freeman Hawk, his father George's iconoclast friend, reappears after decades of exile in Canada. Unfortunately for the Jameses, Hawk's problems are not in the safely distant past but in Montreal's criminal underworld of the present, and those problems have followed him back to Virginia. Owen doesn't overstate the flaws of either period, neither painting the 1960s as an era of misguided dreams nor, despite George's nostalgia, the present as a betrayal of lost ideals. George may be weak and foolish, Hawk self-serving, and Jake inexperienced, but each shows he can rise to the occasion despite his weaknesses. Owens interweaves father's and son's stories skillfully while steering them toward the inevitable violent conclusion. (Dec.)