Daniel Ford's 12 years behind bars are coming to an end. In 36 days
the state will take its revenge for the murder of Nathan Verney,
Daniel's lifelong friend. Daniel struggles to put his life in
order, to put into perspective his brief moments on the planet, to
hold them up against those tumultuous years of '50s and '60s
America in which his life was played out. Daniel needs to pinpoint
his mistakes and his weaknesses because he believes that somehow,
somewhere he is to blame. Not for the murder of Nathan, of which he
is innocent, but for allowing himself to be drawn into the whole
sorry mess that his life has become. But Daniel can't know of the
powerful forces that worked against him then, forces that are
working against him still. Father John Rousseau does, though, and
although Daniel doesn't know it yet, Father John Rousseau is his
only hope. Roger Jon Ellroy's first novel is a worthy attempt to
capture the traumatizing American experience of conspiracy and war
that was the 1960s, showing how the carefree lives of Daniel Ford
and Nathan Verney are slowly eroded by the events that are
happening around them on the bigger stage. Ellroy's flavour of
small-town America is nicely evoked and carefully distilled. The
relationship between the two central characters is realistically
argumentative and temperamental. The novel's only weakness lies in
the depiction of their adversaries; whether loud-mouthed college
kids or Ku Klux Klan thugs, they lack the necessary definition to
be anything more than bogeymen. For the most part, however, this is
an accomplished, well-paced novel with a nicely written if
unsurprising ending. (Kirkus UK)
Daniel and Nathan were six years old when they first met and became
best friends. Thirty years later Dan is convicted of Nathan's
murder . . . Daniel Ford has thirty-six days to live. Accused of
the horrific murder of his best friend Nathan twelve years before,
he has exhausted all appeals and now faces the long walk to the
electric chair. All he can do is make peace with his God. Father
John Rousseau is the man to whom the last month of Daniel's life
has been entrusted. All the two men have left to do is rake over
the last ashes of Ford's existence. So he begins to tell his story.
Daniel's story takes him from his first meeting with Nathan, aged
six, on the shores of a lake in 1952, through first loves, Vietnam,
the death of Kennedy and finally their flight from the draft which
ends in Nathan's brutal murder. But meanwhile the clock is ticking
and the days are running out . . .
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