Devant le pénitencier de Grassland près de Chicago, un homme attend. Il guette la sortie de Hartley Nolan, emprisonné depuis quatre ans pour homicide involontaire. Par sa faute, une jeune femme, Sonia, avait trouvé la mort dans un tragique accident de voiture. Une onde de choc avait alors traversé les deux familles, celle de la victime et celle du coupable. Et l’ancien golden boy au destin brisé n’a peut-être pas fini de payer sa dette, car l’homme qui l’attend occupait une place particulière dans la vie de Sonia… Mais quand la libération de Hartley est repoussée de vingt-quatre heures, toutes les cartes sont rebattues. En onze chapitres qui se lisent comme autant de nouvelles, Baird Harper livre une magistrale variation sur la famille. L’histoire de deux clans frappés par le deuil et la culpabilité est au cœur d’un roman où le suspense va de pair avec une vision subtile de ce qui se joue quand nos existences basculent.

When two cars collide at an intersection in a leafy Chicago suburb, Hartley Nolan is not the person police expect to find behind the wheel. After all, he barely drinks; everyone knows it's his wife who's the alcoholic. But the bigger question on people's minds is what brought Sonia Senn, dead at the scene, back to her hometown in such a hurry that night? In eleven tightly linked stories, Red Light Run pulls us into the inner lives of Hartley, Sonia, and a host of other characters to untangle the mounting forces that carry them to their fates. Among the ensemble in this prismatic collection are a real estate agent who seeks gossip on the market rather than houses, a trailer park developer whose entire livelihood is laid to waste by a single cigarette, a divorced mother battling her daughter-in-law for hegemony over her kitchen, a widower hell-bent on destroying the invasive species of beetle that's wiping out his oak trees, and a down-and-out handyman with a desperate plan for revenge. And then there's Sonia Senn, with a dark secret of her own, and Hartley Nolan, who has risen above his roots to become a commodities trader in Chicago only to end up sentenced to eight years at Grassland State Prison. With infectiously grim humor and wry insight, these characters contemplate their realities in relation to one tragic moment, propelling us toward a startling revelation about the long and sometimes crooked arc of justice. A brilliant feat of storytelling, Red Light Run is the radiant and stunning debut from Best New American Voices writer Baird Harper.