| Title | : | Lamentation (Jay Porter, #1) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1608091333 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781608091331 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 201 |
| Publication | : | First published October 7, 2014 |
| Awards | : | Anthony Award Best Novel (2015) |
After Jay negotiates his brother's release from the county jail, Chris disappears into the night. As Jay begins to search for him, he is plunged into a cauldron of ugly lies and long-kept secrets that could tear apart his small hometown and threaten the lives of Jay and all those he holds dear. Powerful forces come into play that will stop at nothing until Chris is dead and the information he harbors is destroyed.
Lamentation (Jay Porter, #1) Reviews
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★★★★☆½
Jay Porter’s life is not exactly going according to script. He’s clearly a sharp guy. He breezed through school. Everybody knew he was headed for big things. Figured he’d be putting this sleepy little mountain town in his rear-view in no time flat, yet time’s a slippery fish. He’s over 30 now, still living in that ratty old place over the service station that was supposed be a temporary fix. Working part-time as an estate cleaner, separated from his girl and their two-year-old boy. It’d be easy to blame things on a tough childhood. His parent’s tragic accident clearly had a lasting effect on his brother, but it’s always easier to shirk the blame than face the truth. Procrastination’s a bitch.
Speaking of his brother, Chris has really hit rock bottom. He’s barely scraping by out in the streets, wasting his life away chasing the high. Doing whatever it takes to get to that next fix, and filling up his head with all kinds of nutty conspiracies. Jay’s had to bail him out of trouble more times than he’d care to remember. He’d like to wash his hands of him—erase Chris from his life once and for all. But it’s hard to give up on family, especially when he’s all you got left. However, this time it looks like Chris may have gotten himself into a real pickle. There’s talk of a missing buddy, and a stolen hard drive containing some damning information.
When confronted, Chris spouts more of those crazy conspiracies. Jay’s not buying it though, he’s seen this song and dance one time too many. Until the night he comes home to a ransacked apartment, and takes a hard crack to the noggin that lays him low. Now that they’ve got his full attention, he goes to track Chris down before any of those nasty individuals can lay their hands on him. But he’ll need to strap on his thinking cap, call in a few favors, and step into the role of reluctant detective to crack this nut. So, I’d advise you to tag along, friend. I think you’re in for a real treat.
Bottom line: This was a fairly short but compelling first-person narrative with a great protagonist. More nuanced than your typical by-the-numbers detective story, with a truer to life ending. Good stuff, not to be overlooked. -
This no-holds-barred Northeastern noir centers on Jay Porter's attempt to rescue his brother (again) while somehow turning his own life around so he can be a better father to his son. Jay's brother's problems have kept Jay tied to his home town and estranged from his wife, yet Jay stays loyal to his brother.
The deep, incisive family drama wraps around a mystery or three that drives an icy, winter plot quickly toward a white-knuckle conclusion.
In Jay Porter, Clifford has created a highly sympathetic, self-aware character, one readers will root for all the way to the end.
Highly recommended. -
Thank you, Netgalley and Oceanview Publishing for providing this title in exchange for an honest review.
It is rare that I have the time and/or focus to sit and read an entire book in a day. It is also just as rare that characters, subject matter, AND setting strike such a chord with me. LAMENTATION is as complicated as it is simple.
The simple: Read the publisher's description. Even the less-plausible parts of the plot didn't ruin the flow of the narrative. Jay Porter was so very real to me, as if he were made of flesh and blood and not just paper and ink.
The complicated: Have you ever love-hated a junkie? Wanted to turn away...knew you should turn away, but didn't? Felt unworthy and let years of your life pass you by because you couldn't fix what someone else broke? Used the excuse that blood is thicker than water?
Add in a small town, an icy winter, friends and enemies, shady places, and even a bit of humor.
Heartfelt and highly-recommended. -
Joe Clifford is a writer with a reputation for raw and genuine storytelling. Following up on his successful Junkie Love, a book that I have not yet read but will now place on my reading list, Lamentation is the tale of a struggling Jay Porter in small town New England. With his crisp first-person narrative, Clifford draws us into Jay’s crumbling world, where his parents died early in his life from a tragic accident, the mother of his child lives with another man, and his addict brother is constantly flitting in and out of his life wrecking havoc upon it. As a previous reviewer noted, the novel begins with a deliberate paced character development of Jay’s world. While I would normally reserve criticism for a fast pace crime thriller that took its time to develop, in this case Clifford times it to perfection. Think of a roller coaster, and the initial section of the book is the long climb toward the plunge! On the way up Clifford gives us brief glimpses of what is to come, but much as you would experience at an amusement park where we can see twists and turns, when we get there they pull us in unexpected directions. By the time the novel releases you after its last twist, you realize how many themes that Clifford juggled and weaved into his tapestry: family, brotherly obligation, fatherhood, politics, and a dark secret ripped from the headlines that rots at the core of Jay’s small town. To clever effect, Clifford plants some early seeds in that run-up to the top of the roller coaster that at the time seem innocuous. By the end though, those references to an earlier time bring complete meaning to the novel—for the motivations of the main characters, the story arc that Clifford drives us on, and ultimately a snapshot into a life derailed then found again. Well worth the read. At the pace you’ll flip the pages you’ll be left wanting more Joe Clifford.
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Ring the bell, we have another contender for the 'novel of the year' title belt. LAMENTATION is the story of two brothers, torn apart by a tragedy at an early life and unable to go on with their respective lives, in very different ways. While Chris suffers from an all-consuming drug addiction, Jay's problem is a paralyzing guilt, that prevents him from improving his life. You can't become a person you don't see yourself being.
In LAMENTATION, the Porter brother are confronted in something greater than themselves that confronts them to the city of Ashton, the quiet abode where they grew up, lies in the mountain, forgotten from the world. Joe Clifford has a beautiful, gripping style that's not unlike Dennis Lehane's one of my personal favourites. LAMENTATION is a gut-wrenching, emotional thriller about forgotten America. If you didn't know who Joe Clifford was before reading LAMENTATION, you're not going to forget him any time soon afterwards. -
“Lamentation” is a snow covered mountain overlooking the Northern New Hampshire town of Ashton. What could be prettier? But Ashton has some serious flaws. Just like royal icing hiding cracks in a cake, the snow hides those flaws – until a murder precipitates events that make them all too obvious.
When I chose the novel I assumed that the protagonist was ‘lamenting’ something and was surprised when I realized that I was only partly correct. Prosperity in Ashton ended before our protagonist, Jay Porter, was born. A town past its heyday, struggling to survive like many small towns everywhere.
Jay’s childhood was cut short with the death of his parents in a car accident when he was eight. He and his brother Charlie have struggled ever since. Charlie is older than Jay, but Jay seems to be the more responsible sibling due to the fact that Charlie battles with drug addiction. Jay, on the other hand, is somewhat gainfully employed with an estate clearing business. Hard manual work which seems menial for Jay – a bright, thirty year-old man who has never realized his potential.
Jay’s relationship has ended painfully. His girlfriend left one day with their two year old son when she could no longer endure the demands that Charlie made on Jay’s life and the way that Jay always sells himself short. Jay is devastated by her leaving. He still adores Jenny and their son and his divided loyalties torture his daily life. Now he lives alone with a cat that he has never bothered to name, believing that by not naming him he won’t become too attached.
When Charlie is involved in a murder investigation, Jay once again comes to his aid. Only this time he has become involved in something that could affect all of their lives.
“Lamentation” is a fast-paced thriller with themes of lies, avarice and corruption set in a small town where one influential family will do anything to maintain their power. A family who consider anyone who impedes their goals to be expendable. An enjoyable read that could have benefited from a wee bit more editing (eg. “if shudders weren’t dangling by their hinges”). Obviously this should have read ‘shutters’ – and perhaps this was caught in the final printing.
I commend the author, Joe Clifford, for turning his life around. He was a homeless junkie for several years. His experiences during that time helped him paint an intimate, disturbing and realistic character for Charlie in the novel.
Fictionophile rating: 3-and-half-star-review-rating
Thanks to Oceanview Publishing via NetGalley for providing me with a digital ARC of the novel in exchange for this review.
This review was originally published on my blog:
Fictionophile -
Struggling to survive in a small Northern New Hampshire town in the dead of winter, Jay Porter skirts the edges of poverty working a dead end job clearing junk from old houses when he's contacted by his estranged older brother Chris, a long time homeless drug addict. Chris tells Jay he's found major incriminating evidence on a discarded hard drive but gave no names or details. Dealing with his own issues of depression, survival and lingering feelings toward his ex wife, Jay initially tries to ignore his brother's story but get's increasingly worried when he's attacked, his shabby apartment ransacked and Chris disappears.
What is so compellingly original here is the relationship between the brothers. Jay has long ago written his brother Chris off as a junkie loser but deep down he loves him and has not completely discarded him like the trash he works with. Anyone who knows addicts will immediately recognize Chris as an incredibly destructive person not only to himself but to everyone he comes in contact with especially close relatives. Backing into the mystery of the hard drive, Jay inadvertently realizes that despite his brother's steamer trunk sized baggage, he's still the older brother he looked up and still cares about when everyone else in town hates him for his addiction. Joe Clifford has written an extraordinarily good country noir mystery/thriller that's also about salvation of the soul. It's a masterpiece in that regard and I can't recommend it highly enough. -
[English review down below]
🇮🇹 Ho ricevuto questo libro dall'editore in cambio di una recensione onesta.
Questo libro è stata una completa scoperta, sia per la storia che per l’autore che prima non conoscevo.
La trama è davvero coinvolgente, complessa e semplice allo stesso tempo, piena di colpi di scena, capace di affrontare temi poco trattati perché difficili da affrontare,
Lo stile di scrittura dell’autore è piacevole e scorrevole.
Il protagonista della storia, Jay, è un uomo dal passato complicato, incapace di sentirsi all'altezza di qualsiasi cosa, sia a livello lavorativo che famigliare, con suo figlio e la sua ex moglie. Suo fratello non se la passa tanto meglio, ridotto male a causa della sua dipendenza da droghe; Jay si troverà quindi, per colpa di quest’ultimo, invischiato inconsapevolmente in un gioco di potere.
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🇬🇧 I received this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.
This book was a complete discovery, both for the story and for the author I didn't know before.
The plot is truly engaging, complex and simple at the same time, full of twists and turns, capable of dealing with topics that are difficult to deal with,
The author's writing style is pleasant and fluid.
The main character of the story, Jay, is a man with a complicated past, unable to live up to anything, both in work and family, with his son and his ex-wife. Her brother isn't much better, badly reduced because of his drug addiction; Jay will therefore find himself, because this last, unconsciously entangled in a game of power. -
When Jay gets a phone call telling him his older brother Chris is in jail he’s not surprised because he’s a junkie. He’s been in and out of trouble since their parents died in a car accident years ago. Reluctantly Jay heads to the police station, but from then on what was slow, small town life is never the same again.
Chris’ business partner, Pete, has been found dead. Jay is confounded, because Chris can barely tell what time of day it is, never mind run a company. The local police think Chris is at fault, but there’s no evidence to say so and Jay gets his brother back on the streets. Again.
Chris tells Jay that Pete was killed because they found something they weren’t supposed to on a computer they were recycling. But Chris has been telling tall stories his whole life and Jay doesn’t believe him. Then Chris disappears and suddenly everyone seems to want to find him – among them a cop up from the city and the Lombardi’s, a local family that control everything from investments to politics. Jay begins to wonder if there isn’t something to Chris’ story after all…
The phrase ‘slow burn’ is often used to describe a story that steadily unfolds, usually maintaining the same unremitting pace until the final word. With Lamentation this too is apt. To a point. Because here Clifford has lit a fuse which leads to a rather large bomb which, when it explodes, leaves no-one unscathed and in the process ramps up the tension considerably in the back quarter.
At the outset this seems like an ordinary enough tale. Small town boy who’s lost his family, has a troubled junkie brother, and is separated from Jenny, the woman he still loves and the mother of his son, because he doesn’t believe he’s good enough for her. Written in the first person through Jay’s eyes we understand fully the cul-de-sac he’s driven down.
But with Pete’s murder this seemingly dead end life gets flipped upside down. Jay, reluctantly, begins to investigate Pete’s death because he’s doing something he’s spent his life on – looking after his waster older brother. The plot grows in complexity as Jay’s understanding widens until he and the reader is faced with the whole dirty picture.
Clifford is a highly accomplished writer – the evidence is clear in his previous novels, Junkie Love and Wake The Undertaker. Lamentation is subtly different, but I find it hard to put my finger on why. Perhaps it’s because there is a large element of family involved. Secondly I like the fact that some of the questions the author poses, such as whether Jay’s parent’s death was an accident, aren’t fully answered at the conclusion. What had been a weight for Jay, he’s now able to cast off and properly live his life. And it’s these subtleties and extra layers that push the rating from four to five stars. If you don’t yet know Joe Clifford, you really should.
**Originally reviewed for Books & Pals blog. May have received free review copy.** -
Lamentation is a gripping story of brotherly love. A relationship unlike one I've read before. Both Jay (the protagonist) and his brother have plenty of demons, their relationship far from perfect. And yet, the character arcs unfolded flawlessly throughout the novel. Joe Clifford is a talented crime writer who certainly knows how to keep his readers glued to the pages. The action scenes were some of the best I've ever read. Plenty of twists and turns to keep even the most critical reader gripped to 'The End'. I highly recommend this book as well as anything else this author writes. Not only is his writing clean, his story structure perfect, but he's a master at building suspense.
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Top-notch writing. This story takes noir out of the gritty big city and out into the hinterlands of rural New Hampshire. But, scratch the surface of those pretty mountains and golden foliage and you have a world of outsiders and misfits, drug addicts, petty thieves, prostitutes, motorcycle gangs, and devious conspirators.
The cold New England winter gives substance to the bitterness and loneliness that blows through the air. Lead character, Jay Porter, is as down on his luck as any noir character, struggling to make ends meet in a dead end job, living in a crappy apartment, estranged from his girlfriend and toddler son, haunted by his parents' death when their brakes failed on an icy road, haunted by his drug addict brother who only shows up with trouble in his wake.
Most of all, though, what makes this story something special is the easygoing narrative voice that tells a story you just can't put down. Above all, a writer needs to be a storyteller, not just a wordsmith, and Clifford spins a damn good yarn. -
*ARC FOR HONEST REVIEW*
Wasn't too sure of this book when I first started reading it as it was slow starting for awhile, but towards the middle it really started to pick up and turned the entire experience around! I must say over all, I actually enjoyed this book! Turned out to be a great mystery that kept you on the edge of your seat! -
I think I know a little something about being the straight brother of a crank shooter. And from that perspective, I can tell you Joe Clifford's new book, "Lamentation" -- which will be released in October -- gets it exactly right: my brother may have been a dope fiend, but he was still my brother -- with all the heartbreak, love and disappointment that entails.
"Lamentation" is told from the perspective of Jay, whose older brother, Chris, is a speed freak. The novel is set in the fictional community of Ashton in rural New Hampshire and revolves around Jay's attempts to deal with Chris's addiction and protect him after he becomes a "person of interest" in the murder of another doper, Pete, with whom Chris operates a rag-tag computer recycling business.
Jay has had a love-hate relationship with his older brother since their parents were killed in a car wreck. When they were younger, Jay attempted to get Chris into rehab, to clean him up and help ease him back into society; but after Chris repeatedly lapsed back into drug abuse, Jay all but wrote him off as a dope fiend and loser.
Superficially, at least, his assessment is valid: Chris is essentially homeless, augmenting his meagre earnings from the computer business by turning tricks at a local truck stop, and pulling in enough occasional income to take a room at a sordid truck stop motel that specializes in rentals by the hour.
Not that Jay is exactly a success story, himself: he makes a hand-to-mouth living clearing houses whose occupants have died, boxing up dead people's furniture and knick-knacks for his boss to sell to area antique dealers. He has a two-year-old son, Aidan, by a woman named Jenny that he is deeply in love with, but he's messed their relationship up so completely that his ex- has shacked up with a former motorcycle outlaw rather than go on living with him. His social circle consists of one really close friend -- even though he lives in the kind of pissant town where everyone knows everybody else and no one ever leaves -- and a big night out is a couple of beers at a local pub while a Bruins game flickers on the TV.
It's a lot like Placerville, California, the burg where I was born and spent my teenage years. Spend a year or so in a place like Ashton or Placerville and you stop wondering why people get strung out on drugs.
As bad as things are, they take a turn for the worse when Chris and his partner get hold of a computer hard-drive that contains compromising information someone wants buried. First Pete, the partner, is murdered, his body dumped in a pool of storm runoff. Chris tells his brother about the drive, but Chris's frequent paranoid delusions make Jay skeptical.
Then Chris goes missing, the squalid shack Jay lives in is ransacked and Jay gets his head cracked by an intruder. The responsible younger brother soon finds himself searching for his irresponsible sibling in a world populated by biker gang members, skanky truck-stop prostitutes, crooked politicians and incompetent police.
Despite its no-nonsense, hardboiled veneer, Lamentation is surprisingly tender. While the novel is essentially a crime story, at its core is the uneasy relationship between the two brothers, a relationship so fraught with doom that it colors everything else in their lives.
Clifford is the author of two other novels, Junkie Love and Wake the Undertaker. He has written numerous short stories, is an editor at Out of the Gutter Online, and produces Lip Service West: True Stories, a regular series of readings by local authors.
I have had the pleasure of reading a lot of really good stories by new authors working in the neo-pulp tradition this year and "Lamentation" is one of the best: the writing is crisp, the plot sufficiently complex to hold the reader's interest and keep him or her off-balance, and the characters believable and fully-developed.
There is even enough mystery about what is actually going on that most the book functions as a legitimate whodunit, and the actual motive for the mayhem is not revealed until the story is nearly over.
But while Clifford's novel is a crime thriller, it is really much, much more: it is a truly excellent story of the troubled relationship between brothers, a topic that gives it additional value outside its literary genre.
Lamentation is a treat. This was one of those books I was sorry to see end. -
Jay Porter's life is not going so great. His girlfriend left him and is seeing a biker, he rarely makes it around to see his boy, his job is not the best and he has been told this last job he is working on will be it for a while. Then he gets a call that his brother has been picked up by the police and is rambling some sort of conspiracy junk. Jay's brother is a junkie always looking for his next fix and he is always making up stories so it's hard to know when he is telling the truth or not.
Chris and another junkie has a job where they take old computers and wipe the memories clean, but Chris looks at the info on one. Chris and his partner Pete get in a big fight on what to do about what they know and then Pete ends up dead. Chris tries to tell Jay about it but Jay doesn't believe anything he says and then Chris goes missing.
Jay isn't really that worried about his brother but at the same time is a bit curious as to what might have happened to him. His friend Charlie wants to get a private investigator and gets Jay to meet with Fisher. Jay and Fisher use to be friends till a incident in high school and now they never talk. He isn't sure about using Fisher, and Fisher is only an insurance investigator, but he does know how to get information.
They learn about some interesting things that are going to be happening to their fare town soon and Jay is not sure how this has anything to do with his brother disappearing. Jay's house is broken into and he is hit on the head but he doesn't really make much of it. Then Adam Lombardi wants something that Chris took and tells him about the hard drive and how it has a lot of work information on it, etc. Jay believes him!!
I am starting to think I am just being harder on books than I use to because this was very lackluster to me and it seems a lot of people on Goodreads disagrees with me...lol. I liked and didn't like Jay. He is very flawed and full of excuses at least to me. I understand that his parents died when he was young and his older brother is a junkie. I can get him not giving his brother the benefit of the doubt as he has probably done so many times. What I didn't get was why when when he finds out how crooked a certain person is that he just believes everything that man says like it explains everything!!
Then when we do find out what is on the hard drive I found the ending to be lacking and it sort of made me a bit mad. So I really hope the rest of this series is going to be better than this mediocre start because I have the third and forth as review books but if I don't make it through book two I might just be dumping them before I get started. :(
I didn't like it but obviously a lot of people did so it's up to you if you want to try it or not as I just can't recommend it. -
Lamentation, Joe Clifford’s riveting new novel, is a page-turner in the classic sense. You can’t put it down. You need to know what comes next.
At the heart of this particular bundle of darkness is an ordinary guy, Jay Porter, trying to get along. He salvages anything of value from empty and abandoned homes, is out of work for long stretches of time, is estranged from ex-girlfriend, Jenny, the love of his life and mother of his young son, Aiden. The bane of Jay’s life is his older brother, Chris. To say that Chris is a loser is an understatement. Chris has a drug problem – and has had for years. He can’t stay clean for long, can’t do much of anything useful. He shows up needing money, a place for the night, and then is gone, back in to the seamy world he chose to live in. Suspicion was cast on Chris years before, when their parents were killed in a car accident. There’s talk of mechanical tampering – a deliberate sabotage of the vehicle.
Chris again becomes the focus of an investigation, when his partner in a computer salvage business turns up dead. This is just the beginning of a very thorny plot that weaves a number of unsavory elements together in Ashton, a small New Hampshire town. Jay overcomes his deep frustration with Chris and attempts to help him out. Layer by layer, Clifford peels back the crime until we arrive at a place we really didn’t expect to be and wish we could escape from in a hurry. What we thought was true, isn’t. What we couldn’t imagine being the case turns out to be true.
Yet Clifford doesn’t tie everything up in one neat package. One question goes unanswered, leaving the reader to wonder and think about the novel long after the last page. As a writer myself, I think this is a great device for keeping the story alive. Another thing I appreciate, again as a writer, is that Clifford’s characters are real people, with levels of complexity, not just types, as is the case with other crime novels I’ve read.
Lastly, on a personal note, as someone who grew up in upstate New York, Clifford’s rendition of snow, cold, and darkness rang wonderfully true for me, and make me glad that I now live in a much milder climate.
Lamentation is truly a fine read. -
“Thick, black, storm clouds roiled over Lamentation Mountain,” which itself lurks over the frozen, dark cesspool of small town Ashton, New Hampshire, once an industrial town, now a depressed hole.
30ish Jay Porter is not the brightest bulb in town. Like many of the characters, he’s trapped by the implacable forces he’s only dimly aware of: the dead-end world of poverty; he’s seemingly old and immobile, still trapped in the adolescent mind of high school sex and grudges, and dropping acid with Turley, the town’s police officer.
His girlfriend Jenny, and their two-year son, Aiden, are living with another man and Jay is not really sure what his role as father entails, as he compares himself to his perfect loving father and mother who died in a car accident in suspicious circumstances when he was eight. And now Jenny and Aiden and Brody, her “follow up,” are moving to Concord, the big city.
Kindly Mr. Lombardi, the high school wrestling coach, reminds Jay at the playground where he takes Aiden: “You’re here with your son. What could possibly be so bad? You hear all those boys laughing? Have you ever heard such a beautiful sound?”
His older brother, Chris, a junkie, is the unlikely moral center and even tragic figure of this terrific novel after he discovers a horrible secret on a recycled computer hard drive and people kill his junkie partner and he disappears with a lot of powerful people looking for him.
Clifford is in Russell Banks’s territory of poor New Hampshire and with the great noir touches the novel moves along with the usual suspects: the powerful “royal” Lombardi family--one brother in the state senate (“Pro family and anti-drugs”), the other in the construction business, the town ready to revitalize itself for tourists.
But again it is Chris the junkie, the liar, the thief, who gleams the grim paradox: Any attempt to escape will go brutally wrong but once he or his brother realize the bitterness of their existence—an escape attempt is inevitable. So, maybe it’s better to not awaken.
But the characters do awaken during a frenetic four days and the novel moves along at a quick pace as the thriller’s pieces come together in a satisfying ending. -
Once you start reading LAMENTATION, you're going to have trouble putting it down. The bleak, atmospheric New England setting is just as enveloping as Gillian Flynn's rundown towns and seedy truck stops in DARK PLACES. However, I enjoyed this book more than DARK PLACES because it wasn't as hard to stomach. Although there are heavy themes, it's a fast-paced thriller that makes you want to uncover the next secret, without using gratuitous violence or gore.
The pacing is fantastic and so is the voice. The dialog is great--realistic, humorous even, and Jay Porter is a narrator you root for. The writing is beautiful and the prose sharp. Clifford knows how to say exactly what he wants to say and doesn't waste words. I only wish this book were longer, I could have continued reading it!
That being said, everything is brought full circle to a satisfying ending. I definitely recommend LAMENTATION for fans of mystery and thriller. This is the best of the genre I've read in a long time. -
Jay Porter is barely scraping by, he works on doing house clearances and he is separated from his fiancee and their son, who are now living with her new boyfriend. Jay's brother Chris, is ten years older than him but is a junkie and although Jay at one time looked up to his brother, since the death of their parents, Jay spends his time trying to clear up his brother's messes. When Chris's partner, in a an eco computer re-cycling business, is found dead, Chris becomes the main suspect but he has disappeared. Jay wants to get to his brother first before the Police do and recruits his best friend Charlie and also reluctantly at Charlie's bidding, an old acquaintance Fisher, who now works as an insurance investigator. Jay discovers that Chris may have discovered some sensitive material on an old hard drive that could have put his life in danger therefore the race is on to locate him before the Police or any other parties do.
I really enjoyed this novel, which is the first of Joe Clifford's that I've read because it seems so authentic and real. You really get a feel for the characters, especially Jay and his dilemma, as he hunts for his brother but at the same time is trying to work at his relationship with his fiancée and his son. He never seems to be able to do the right thing or have the right words despite all the promises he makes and irrationally I even found myself getting annoyed and frustrated by some of his actions. The novel also paints a very real picture of rural small town American life, where good working people are trying to do the best they can to get by but somehow it never seems to be enough. Also it's funny how slight's made by the characters while in high school are never forgotten, even though they happened years ago and they are now all adults those perceived grudges persist. I also liked the fact that apart from Fisher neither Jay nor Charlie are trained investigators but by pooling their respective skills they seem to manage to uncover evidence, sometimes more by chance than anything else.
This is the first in a series of novels featuring Jay Porter and I now plan to read them all and have already started on the next one, December Boys. -
Si legge velocemente e di per sé la trama non è male, ma i personaggi sono tremendi e resta tutto un po' troppo superficiale, mentre avrebbe avuto l'occasione di affrontare un tema sociale interessante come l'enorme quantità di tossicodipendenti abbandonati a loro stessi in totale indigenza nelle zone depresse degli Stati Uniti.
Insomma un romanzo che resta nel suo genere sprecando un paio di interessanti potenziali. -
I listened to a fair few podcasts with Joe Clifford in the recent past and I have some idea what this series means to him and I was excited to get started especially on the back of reading Junkie Love in the last couple of weeks. The qualities I have previously noted in his work show up again with exccedingly strong characterisation and a strong, engaging narrative voice.
Jay Porter is drifting through life following the end of his relationship with Jenny and the estrangement from his young son, Aiden. He is working sorting through the belongings of the recently deceased, barely scratching up enough money to pay for himself and keep up with his child support. He is forced away from his job to collect his brother, Chris, from the local police station and it's far from the first time this has happened with Chris being a drug addict of some notoriety within their small town. Chris is being held for threatening his business partner, who has since gone missing and when the partner turns up dead, the hunt for Chris is on in earnest.
In some ways the novel hues to the tropes of the mystery genre, but Clifford manages to create mysteries within the main mystery that leave you burning through the pages in a fervour for answers. The characters are finely grafted and the relationships are quickly cemented within the narrative meaning that you feel the stakes of the story. And after all that the ending leaves you wanting much, much more.
This is a strong opening salvo to a series I have long looked forward to reading and I'll be sure to get to the next one in short order. -
I Really wish I had this book in time to be able to read it and attend the author's recent visit to our local library. I loved this book but was a bit peeved at my own pace getting through it. As a longtime resident of Kensington I spent a lot of time mentally reading the wrong words and correcting names, places, and locations in my head as opposed to just reading what the author had written.
Once I got past trying to read it "accurately" as a town resident and just go with the author's flow....it was a great book. I loved the fact that the junkie brother was never going to get a spit shine perfect happy ending but he was there to do his best by his brother. Chris was all heart and passion under the demons that drove his vices and he was really the only one with a set of balls to be awake enough to stand up to authority and see behind the façade of every big shot in town.
I was very sad to see that Chris had to go through so much. Everyone has a complex backstory that weaves the fabric of who they become. Sad to say that in a cliquey nosey small town like ours everybody likes to think they know everything just because they know the rumors and the main stories floating around town. Most of what happens in a small town would shock the hell out of people if they took the time to really see behind the veils and delve a little deeper.
Maybe this book is a testament to human strength and breaking the mold and being your own person despite how people pigeonhole you. Maybe this book is about not always accepting everything blindly based on the seemingly shiny happy luster of the people places and things in your little world.
It takes a strong individual, like Jay who was there for his messed up brother time and again....and like Chris who didn't give a shit about outward appearances to question authority to uncover truth in their town and within themselves.
We are more than our good family name just as we are more than what society labels us. It would shock people to dig a little deeper and find what lies beneath our towns, our neighbors, and even in all of us.
I really enjoyed this book.
Maybe Joe can do a book about Berlin's not so secret swingers and group orgies and expose more town secrets along the way! -
Call it rural noir. Or country noir. Or better yet, family noir. Whatever you call it, Lamentation by Joe Clifford is an exceptional suspense story set in the snow-bound backwoods of New Hampshire where Jay Porter, one-time high school star, now divorced father of one, is going nowhere fast working for an estate clearing firm and trying to stay ahead of child support payments. But his brother Chris is doing far worse. Chris is the town junkie and all-around screw-up firmly set on an icy highway to hell. But unexpectedly, Chris finds something, something that important people don't want found.
It's a classic crime story set-up, combining various elements of the "wrong man" and "man on the run" plotlines, and Clifford controls the plot and pacing with skill. That keeps the pages turning, but what really draws the reader into this story is the characters Clifford creates with rich detail. From the Porter brothers, to ex-wife Jenny and her current live-in, to best friend Charlie and Fisher, the private investigator, the well-to-do Lombardi family, everyone seems real and unexpected.
As for the story itself, what separates Lamentation from so many similar crime novels is that Clifford is great at shifting gears and changing direction. It's not so much a matter of shocking revelations and twist endings as it is a subtle change in direction. You think you're going in a certain direction with the story when subtly, Clifford goes somewhere else. Or you barreling toward the conclusion of the book, pretty sure how it's going down, only to find that it doesn't. And it all flows evenly, without a glitch. You go with it, because you're under the spell of a great storyteller you know is going to deliver, even when it's not what you expect.
Lamentation is just a fine, fine novel. A story of crime, a story of families, guilt, greed, corruption, tragedy, and loss. And a little bit of hope. It will grip you and hold you to the very last page. And you'll love every minute of it. -
Procured via: NetGalley
Book Title and Author: Lamentation by Joe Clifford
Rating: 4 Stars Download it to your kindle immediately!
Release Date: October 7, 2014
Genre: Family Literature, Mystery & Thriller, Psychological
Audience: Fans of contemporary literature, mysteries and suspense a la Dennis Lehane will truly enjoy Lamentation
Series: Standalone
Summary: From the book blurb " In a frigid New Hampshire winter, Jay Porter is trying to eke out a living and maintain some semblance of a relationship with his former girlfriend and their two-year-old son. When he receives an urgent call that Chris, his drug-addicted and chronically drunk brother, is being questioned by the sheriff about his missing junkie business partner, Jay feels obliged to come to his rescue.
After Jay negotiates his brother’s release from the county jail, Chris disappears into the night. As Jay begins to search for him, he is plunged into a cauldron of ugly lies and long-kept secrets that could tear apart his small hometown and threaten the lives of Jay and all those he holds dear.
Powerful forces come into play that will stop at nothing until Chris is dead and the secrets he keeps are destroyed."
Review and Opinion: Lamentation will resonate with readers long after the last page has been read. Clifford started the novel slowly, developing characters that readers will come to view as family by the end of this book. He creates a rare relationship between reader and novel, engaging readers in a way that makes one mourn the end of the book.
This book crosses a number of genres, from contemporary literature to mystery & thriller, which is going to appeal to a wide audience. I truly enjoyed Clifford’s story, and will be seeking out his previous books in short order!
FYI:
Wake the Undertaker April 2013
Choice Cuts October 2013
Junkie Love March 2013 -
Lamentation's characters deftly evoke its New England winter setting: a pervasive cold that you can't see the end of, countered by moments of internal heat that are ultimately unsatisfying. The main character Jay is a man just trying to get though his job's winter down season and do right by his son and estranged girlfriend, when his junkie brother resurfaces with another of his usual ridiculous conspiracy stories. Only this one just might be true, threatening to sweep Jay up in the plot whether he wants to or not.
Clifford does a good job portraying New England scrappiness, and small-town drama and secrets, but his characters' interactions, the slow-burning regrets and conflicts among brothers and lovers boiling up through the cold winter, are what make this book great. His use of tone, voice, and figurative language often elevates the narrative beyond the typical mystery-thriller to something more literary.
Living through a New England winter myself with a kid on the way and little to no money did several things to me: it made me a Patriots and Red Sox fan (The Patriots get you through the incessant snowing; the Red Sox keep the promise of Spring real when the grey snow refuses to melt; though I'll admit I don't follow the Bruins as fervently as Jay's friend Charlie does in the book, and this year's Warriors team was the only one that got me to care about pro basketball); it taught me how to adapt to life in cold, where snow plows bury your car and your windshield wiper fluid is frozen solid; and it made me critical of the authenticity of stories set in New England. But the only issues I had on the setting were admittedly nit-picky, and never enough to take me out of the narrative. Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone that appreciates their mystery/thriller/noir with a strong sense of language, place, and characterization. -
http://ensuingchapters.com/2015/10/29...
While I enjoy the occasional police procedural or detective tale, I find it difficult to relate to those worlds. As a writer I see the appeal of having a strong, resourceful protagonist whom you can throw into high-drama situations knowing they can believably fight their way out of it.
But as a reader, I’ve always been drawn to the blue-collar characters who stumble in over their heads.
Enter Jay Porter. He’s a menial laborer living paycheck to paycheck, burdened by stress, bills and an estranged lover and their small child. Porter lives in a remote, oppressive town, cut-off from civilization by the New England winter.
Clifford so ably captures this world that it made me uncomfortable. From the opening scene, I felt edgy, depressed. I carried the full weight of Porter’s burden as my own.
That’s some damn fine writing.
That uneasy feeling in the belly swells when Porter is called down to the police station to pick-up his drug-addled brother, who is spouting off conspiracy theories involving town elites. It is further evidence of his brother’s decline, he believes, until his brother’s business partner turns up dead.
As he wades deeper into the fog, Porter unearths a dark secret that puts the life of himself and his brother in danger. With limited funds or capable weapons, and zero well-placed connections, Porter must rely on a loyal friend and an old rival.
Lamentation is my kind of novel. There are no experts, no sharpshooters, no aces in sleeves. There is no posse to rescue the hero. Just a quartet of hard-luck locals with long odds up against the wealthy, powerful and corrupt.
Porter is not the most likable character, or self-aware, but you’ll be rooting for him throughout. I’m already excited for the sequel, December Boys, due out next summer. -
Ashton, New Hampshire is a tough place. In the shadow of Lamentation Mountain, it's a small, weather-beaten oasis in a desolate land. Jay Porter is a seasonal worker, and his season's faded as this story opens. He is an estranged father, with a son, Aiden, and his mother Jenny. A promise of being the head of a loving family is always just out of reach. Or maybe he stopped reaching.
He is, reluctantly, the part-time keeper of his older, junkie brother, Chris. Chris's misadventures bring Jay many times to the local jail to bail him out. But this latest misadventure leaves Chris's business-partner killed, leaving Chris a hunted man holding secrets that, if revealed, could bring down one of the most powerful families, not just in Ashton, but in the whole state of New Hampshire.
What I got most from this novel is oppression. Every paragraph drives home the oppression of the winter in the mountains of New Hampshire. I live a stone's throw from the Adirondack Mountains in New York, and I know this particular feeling. It's a natural, but hated thing in the winter. Clifford saturates every bit of this story in that oppressive feel. It's not just depictions of snow. It's depictions of a distance in Jay, in Chris, in Jay's relationship with Aiden's mother, Jenny. You can't escape the pervasive frigidity in Ashton, and in this story, you don't want to.
Another thing I noticed about this novel is how easy it is to relate to the characters. They're well drawn, and they will make you think of that guy you know, or that girl you know. They might make you think about yourself. -
"Chris was Ashton’s village idiot. And he was my problem."
Jay Porter seems to be pedaling very hard - and staying in the same place. He lives in a crappy apartment. His girlfriend, Jenny, that he loves, left him and took their toddler son. He works hard at a dead-end job, selling off the contents of houses in estate sales.
His life has always been hard. His parents were killed in a car crash when he was 8 years old and he went to live with an aunt and uncle while his brother, Chris, who is 10 years older, went off the deep end and has been in and out of drug rehab ever since.
Now Chris is in trouble and he's dragged Jay into it and Jay is trying his best to figure out whether Chris is just full of conspiracy theories or if there's some truth to his bizarre claims.
I enjoyed this dark thriller set in freezing cold and snowy Ashton, New Hampshire. It's the first book in a series with Jay Porter as the protagonist and author Joe Clifford is exceptional at painting some dark, twisted word pictures - about hardscrabble lives and drug addiction.
"Her skirt hitched enough to reveal a stretched-out red thong that had probably been peeled more times than bulk potatoes in a soup kitchen."
I am now off to read the next book in the series DECEMBER BOYS. -
*ARC received in exchange for an honest review*
I had a difficult time getting too excited about the beginning third of this book as I felt it was a little slow moving. The second third began to show some promise and by the end there were some scenes that left me gasping. Another plus to this book were the well thought out characters. You really felt as though these people were your friends.
I don't know if the author, while writing "Lamentation",was aware of an incident that occurred at a university in Pennsylvania and was very similar to an incident in his book. The real life incident had a much different ending than the fictional one; which was definitely a good thing for the victims if the crime.
I would recommend this book to anyone who likes to read suspense and mysteries with great characterization. -
Review: LAMENTATION by Joe Clifford
I am totally in love with this fascinating New Hampshire Noir series, literate, intriguing, with a die-hard protagonist. Jay Porter is thirty, with an ex-girlfriend he still loves and a toddler son, Aiden. Orphaned at age eight, when both parents died in a suspicious vehicle fatality, Jay has long been the caretaker for his decade-old brother Chris, who failed the promise of his high-school wrestling stardom to fall into the drug abyss. Jay lives a purely working-class existence as a seasonal estate cleaner in a state where winter is a serious business.
But Jay Porter rises above his adversity. He is an individual of massive integrity. No matter what, failures and troubles, beatings and loss of loved ones, job loss, alcoholism, he perseveres, and he always strives to choose the right option. An admirable protagonist is he.
