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Absolution Novello Festival Press Winner of the Novello Literary Award Maggie Delaney’s world implodes one rainy afternoon when her husband Richard is murdered in a botched drugstore robbery. To her horror, Maggie learns the shooting may not have been an accident. An idealistic wife and mother, Maggie attempts to find out what really happened. Her search leads her back to her Carolina roots, through the streets of 1960s New York and modern-day Boston. She retraces the steps of a generation that came of age when the Vietnam War raged and the world was embroiled in conflict. Then, as the murder trial draws near, disturbing questions will arise about Richard and his possible role in military atrocities. Finally, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, Maggie will uncover a legacy of secrets about the man she thought she knew—and the troubled world they shared.
Reviews “This impressive Novello Literary Award-winning debut skillfully combines a contemporary courtroom thriller with a subtle look back at the competing passions and pressures of the Vietnam War era. Maggie Delaney's world has been shattered by her husband Richard's murder after he intervened to protect a drugstore clerk from a gunman, teenage Vietnamese immigrant Anh Dung Nguyen. The local DA is convinced that his case against Nguyen is a slam dunk, but that assessment proves off-base when Everett Quincy, a high-profile attorney from New York, takes the case. Quincy suggests that Delaney's death is connected with his experiences in Vietnam, which may have led him to undue violence against Nguyen. This twist reawakens Maggie's antiwar past, as well as her long-ago personal relationship with Quincy. The flashbacks to the war are convincing, and despite some awkward plot elements, Herin delves deep into questions of guilt and forgiveness while demonstrating a gift for the nuances of personal interactions.” “Part murder mystery, part legal thriller, part reflection on the Vietnam War in light of current wars, this novel finds Maggie Delaney recovering from the violent death of her husband, Richard, as the young man accused of the crime goes to trial. Richard Delaney, successful lawyer, Vietnam War veteran, father, and husband, was gunned down by Anh "Billy" Nguyen at a drugstore near his office. What at first seemed an unfortunate random act of violence becomes complicated when a prominent attorney who is a veteran of the antiwar movement joins the defense team. Long-buried secrets about covert missions and war crimes become the focus of the investigation, and Maggie searches for Richard's former buddies to try to understand what happened to her husband so long ago. Her own involvement with the antiwar movement in college ties her to parts of a past that unfold during the trial. Very involving, although the secrets can unroll with frustrating deliberateness; recommended for most fiction collections.” “In this fierce and impressive debut, Miriam Herin asks us to open our eyes wide to the hopes, failures, compassion, and cruelty of life. Absolution ventures deep into the human psyche. Remarkable in scope, the story takes us from Boston to Vietnam and back, a journey that is unsettling—at times, harrowing—but unquestionably spellbinding the whole way. I urge you to read this book.” “Among the thorny truths that haunt Miriam Herin’s gripping, all-too-human novel, Absolution, is that no war is ever over when it’s ‘over.’ Time may heal wounds, but the shards of desperate acts remain invisibly imbedded. The scars that mar the prosperous, smooth-surfaced marriage of pretty do-gooder Maggie Delaney and her Vietnam vet-turned-lawyer husband, Richard, are not of flesh but spirit. And the powers of residual pain lie sleeping—until Richard steps into a drugstore, and is shot by a teenaged stranger with the face of an old enemy. Why? Thereby hangs not one tale, but many, buried threads of old hurts and hidden lives, expertly woven to remind us, over and over—almost nothing is ever quite what it seems.” “Absolution delicately and skillfully depicts an anguished clash between secrets and justice in the heart of Maggie Delaney, a grieving widow. In the process, it also casts a beguiling and suspenseful net back across five decades—dropping the reader into nightmarish battles in Vietnam and also into backrooms of the ‘60s U.S. peace movement. Miriam Herin has written a big story, compelling and suspenseful, bringing home consequences of war and misguided love, as they refuse to stay where we might like them to stay—in the past. The Novello Literary Award has published another winner.” "Absolution is superb. It's a wonderful and unusual combination of compelling story and character analysis that is extremely deep and thought provoking. I knew at a certain point I'd have to keep reading to finish it, no matter how late at night, and that's what happened. The book captures so well the epistemological and ethical limits in which we humans inevitably live, whether in the wartime of Vietnam or the United States of today.
This is brilliant, wonderful writing. The book is superb.”
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