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| The King of Lies | 
 enlarge | Author: John Hart
Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy New: $7.94
You Save: $15.01 (65%)
New (9) Used (9) from $6.72
Avg. Customer Rating:  98 reviews
Sales Rank: 153746
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
ASIN: B0012BM1JE
Publication Date: May 16, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new! Beautifu!! May have a small remainder mark (ink mark) along the edge. gift quality, crisp, clean, multiple copies available, prompt shipping, excellent service.
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Product Description
John Hart creates a literary thriller that is as suspenseful as it is poignant, a riveting murder mystery layered beneath the southern drawl of a humble North Carolina lawyer. When Work Pickens finds his father murdered, the investigation pushes a repressed family history to the surface and he sees his own carefully constructed facade begin to crack.
Work’s troubled sister, her combative girlfriend, his gold digging socialite wife, and an unrequited lifelong love join a cast of small town characters that create no shortage of drama in this extraordinary, fast-paced suspense novel.
Hart’s mastery of prose and plot belie his newcomer status as he explores the true heart of a man. An illuminating anatomy of a murder and the ripple effect it produces within a family and a community, The King of Lies is a stunning debut.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 93 more reviews...
 Grisham Buried in Pop Psychology July 27, 2006
51 out of 63 found this review helpful
Ezra Pickens, North Carolina backwoods lawyer extraordinaire and hardass of Olympian proportions, has been missing for eighteen months and feared dead. When his skeletal reamins are finally found in an abandoned mall, there is no doubt he was murdered. Lawyer son Jackson Workman Pickens, or "Work", stumbles around in some feeble attempt to protect sister Jean, who he believes the perp, and soon finds himself the prime suspect.
John Hart's debut reads like two different novels. In the first half of the novel, I found "Work" simply annoying. I doubt that Hart wanted to make his protagonist such a wimp, but about 100 pages of Work's whining about his childhood, his mean rich daddy, and his pathetic life in general was just grinding me down. OK, so he's not had the model life, and as a result his drinking, adultery, and general shiftlessness is justified. We got all that - let's move on.
And remarkably, Hart does just that. Once past the bitch wife, the gay sister and her wacko girlfriend, and the cop with a grudge, Hart spins a genuinely suspenseful mystery and legal drama, reminiscent of Scott Turow in his early days. The plot thickens, unfolds, takes a couple of entertainingly ugly diversions, and finishes with a John Grisham flourish. Hart has literary skills, no doubt about it, and he spices up his drama with tales of child abuse and murder definitely not for the feint of heart. While off to a slow start, Hart finishes strong, and is definitely a name to watch.
 Exciting debut! June 7, 2006
38 out of 45 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this book so much. The main character, a man as flawed as the rest of us, had me enthralled from the first page. By the middle of the book, I found myself unable to put it down, reading page after page as fast as I could. I have to admit, I kind of had the whole thing figured out, but that didn't take away the pleasure of reading this book to the end. A little twist here, a liitle twist there, great reading.
I look forward to your next book Mr. Hart.
 More Foreshadowing Than a Bookcase of Victorian Potboilers November 25, 2006
27 out of 35 found this review helpful
I really expected to like this book. The dust jacket is covered with praise of the highest order, in many cases from fine practioneers of the writing craft.
So what went wrong?
As my title explains, this book uses too much foreboding and foreshadowing. Not since Thomas Cook have I seen someone who starts with such melodrama, then layers on globs of vague foreboding, and then lards over his product with thick gobs of foreshadowing.
It makes the first half of the book very hard to get through. Despite on of the endorsements claiming that this book will be read at 1-2 sittings, I had to stop half way through and read books by Richard Stark and Max Collins to get a head of steam back up for finishing The King of Lies.
The second thing that went wrong is that I realized a third of the way through the book who did it. The basic plot is well thought out, and most authors could keep the reader in suspense until the book was almost done. But the heavy handedness of the foreshadowing betrays Hart's villian chapters too early, and the strongest asset of the book, its plot, is rendered moot by the premature set of clues that give the guilty party away.
Several other reviewers have commented that the two halves of the book are almost like two different books. I agree emphatically.
The protagonist, who seems to be in mammoth self-destruct mode for the first half of the book suddenly develops a spine in the second half and eventually solves the mystery of his father's death. The first half is a 1 star, the second a 3 to 4.
Hart shows some real promise in this debut. The plot is quite well constructed. A few of the side characters are drawn with unusual depth. The legal aspects of the book ring very true.
However, many of the actions of several characters come across as an affirmative argument for the doctrine of predestination, which is scarely the grist for the thriller genre. Adding the extreme overuse of foreshadowing, and the book descends into an exercise where I found myself asking time and again why the characters didn't snap out of their rigidly proscribed behaviors.
Predestination worked for the Greek tragedies, but mystery thrillers are not Greek tragedies. And even the Greeks knew not to overmix foreshadowing with characters doomed to their fates.
THESE LIES HAVE A KING, A QUEEN AND A COUPLE OF PRINCESSES... March 9, 2007
19 out of 19 found this review helpful
Oh dad, poor dad, you've been done in, and no one is sad!!
What we have here is a vivid story of a murder in a small North Carolina town complete with a cadre of characters who are more than just a little crazy. The main character has three last names. He also has a gold digging wife, a mistress, a suicidal dysfunctional sister whose "baggage" includes a bizarre lesbian lover and last, but not least, we have a bitchy, power hungry cop who is out to get our protagonist.
In many ways the story is predictable and the "mystery" adequate but
uninspired. The strength of the book lies in the authors finely crafted
character development. You can empathize with the middle aged hero and the effects his frustration and disappointment coupled with a self destructive streak have had on his life.
Not the masterpiece some reviewers think it is, but definitely worth the time it takes to read it. 3 1/2 stars.
A page-turner that could use a little fine-tuning June 11, 2006
15 out of 24 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this book, and will probably get his next one. He has a ton of potential. What works really well here is the voice and rhythm of the story, and the pace, it's a page-turner, once you get past the first chapter. The beginning was slow for me, because it feels too 'writerly', where the words slowed down the story. A few chapters in though, and he found his stride and the voice smoothed out. The main character, Work, is hard to like though. There is no good reason for why he married his wife, no bond or connection there at all, so I found it difficult to buy that he would willingly cast aside his true love to marry someone else. That was never convincingly explained. I also saw the ending coming a mile away, and 'whodunit' was a disappointment. I was hoping I was wrong, as it was just too over-the-top for this reader. But, I do like his writing, and hope his next book is better.
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