Bloodroot - Hardcover

Loehfelm, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399155929 ISBN 13: 9780399155925

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2009

Synopsis

The brilliantly ambitious thriller- frightening, twisted, and filled with secrets and heartbreak-from the author of Fresh Kills.

Kevin Curran wants to unite his family, but he's ready to give up on his younger brother, Danny-three years lost to heroin addiction and hard, desperate living on the streets of New York. When Danny shows up on Kevin's Staten Island doorstep, looking clean, fit, and prosperous, Kevin can't help but be overjoyed that his brother has escaped his past life. But at what price? Not even Kevin's worst nightmares could have prepared him for the horrors he'll discover about his brother's dark history.

After a brief reunion, Danny offers Kevin a role in an underworld plot revolving around the Bloodroot Children's Hospital, an abandoned juvenile asylum with a nefarious past. Hoping to rescue Danny from his criminal life after years ago failing to save him from his addiction, Kevin accepts.

While Danny's plan unfolds, Kevin is drawn into a world of murder, Mafia hit men and dangerous espionage. The halls of Bloodroot reveal one horrifying secret after another: about the building's history, about Danny's life of addiction and crime, and about the true roots of the Curran family. At the end of the maze of monsters, the brothers make a discovery so horrific it may force them to destroy each other.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island, Bill Loehfelm moved to New Orleans in 1997 where he's taught high school and college, managed a pizza joint and an antique shop, and tended bar in the Quarter and the Warehouse District. Winner of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, his work has also appeared in the anthologies Year Zero and Life in the Wake.

From Publishers Weekly:

Loehfelm follows Fresh Kills (2008), which won Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award, with another novel that mines the emotional dynamics of family relationships, if with fewer thrills. Kevin Curran, a history teacher at a Staten Island community college, is surprised when his younger brother, Danny, turns up after years spent on the street as a drug addict. Danny, who's kicked his habit but is now working for a local crime kingpin, persuades Kevin to help him dig up several bodies buried on the grounds of the long-abandoned Bloodroot Children's Hospital, a horrifying concentration camp–like institution for kids from which Danny was adopted. Soon Kevin finds himself enmeshed in a complicated plan involving an illegal property development project. The action gets moving in the final pages, but by then some readers will feel they know a lot about Kevin and Danny but not enough about the evil scientists and unspeakable crimes associated with Bloodroot. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0399155929
• ISBN 13: 9780399155925
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336