After spending four years in prison for vehicular manslaughter, Hartley Nolan is released and back at home with his parents and his wife. Supposedly he was driving drunk when involved in a car accident and where the wife of a prominent resident was killed. But she had been racing from another town to get to her hometown in the middle of the night.

This is basically a story that is written in a series of short stories showing how if you pull one thread, the sweater unravels. This one action touched many different people in one way or another. Each of the voices has a story to tell, from their own viewpoint.

This was an interesting reading experience. The idea of writing a story within a set of short stories has never occurred to me. The beginning (or first short story) drew me in. But the middle is bit jarring, not evenly paced. The ending put everything in place. I have to confess, there were few characters that I actually liked or felt empathy for. The main characters were cleverly written, secondary characters not so much.

Many thanks to the author / Scribner / Netgalley for the digital copy. Opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own.

Run Light Run is a novel presented as a series of interconnected stories, mostly radiating from one central event; the running of a red light. As a whole, this is a well written exploration of family drama set in a suburb of Chicago.

I enjoy when situations are examined from various view points and perspectives, and Harper does a good job of shifting these around. Each story/chapter is from the point of view of a different character, all of whom have some connection by varying degrees. The author manages to keep things interesting while not over complicating the narrative. It's not at all difficult to recall a passage that another story may reference.

I'm on the fence in regards to the "linked stories" format. From what I've gathered, Harper is better known as a short story writer. So, it make sense that this format may be more comfortable to him for a debut novel. And as a novel it works. I think I struggle a bit with the word "stories" only because these rarely have the ability to stand on their own. The first story in the book possibly could. And maybe the last as well. But the middle drags a bit. It seems that these middle sections in particular could never stand as stories on their own without the others for support. Fortunately, being presented as a novel made of stories, this is a minor issue.

Red Light Run is a story of the complexity of human relationships in small towns, and the lifelong shockwaves a single death can cause.

Hartley Nolan is being released from prison in a few days. He's served four years for drink driving and causing the death of Sonia, the wife of the local cemetery owner. Except Hartley was a renowned teetotaller so it all seemed a little odd at the time.

From Sonia's distressed sister - who was the last person to speak to Sonia that night - to Hartley's notorious drunkard wife, to Sonia's entirely deranged husband and Hartley's consistently useless father, we get to hear from almost every person who has been affected by the tragedy.

Their stories seem only loosely linked, but as they circle around apparently unrelated issues - such as the serial killer who murdered Hartley's wife's mother - the pieces start to fit together until we finally meet up with Sonia towards the end of the book, and find out exactly what happened the night she died.

I really enjoyed Red Light Run. The novel rolls from one point of view to another - one per chapter - running like a narrative maypole around the imminent and actual release of Hartley Nolan from jail. Some character points of view feel even and rational; others border on virtual psychotic episodes.

The writing is fabulous and the scope is fairly epic in exploring the lasting effects a single accident can have on such a massive number of lives. Harper uses humour and poetic prose in equal measure to tell the stories of everyday people in an everyday small town whose lives are blown apart by  death.

I was mildly suspicious of this book at first, simply because I'm not usually a huge fan of short stories and this book is billed as 'linked stories'. However, it didn't feel like a series of short stories. It feels more like a traditional split narrative with a couple of caveats - there are about a dozen or so points of view and you never get to return to a narrator once you've left them.

I really like this style of writing. I think it is awesome to see an incident and how it impacts people's lives from various points of view. It is easy to forget that the same story can be told several different ways depending on the point of view. It had a good pace and held my interest.

I love connected short stories and I love stories told from different perspectives showing how different the world looks for different people. I adored the first two stories and was sure that this'll be a book I just love. But while there was plenty to enjoy and I absolutely devoured this book, I still ultimately found the experience uneven.

The first and the last story in this collection were my absolute favourite and I love how the last story recontextualized what came before. I adore how Baird Harper slowly built these characters and connections and connected this to a larger whole that is perfectly framed by those two stories.

The middle part however was uneven for me and the stories started to not add a whole lot to the overall story while at the same time not really working as short stories in their own right. Ultimately this is my biggest issue: the short stories were not strong enough on their own; without the context of the work they would not make much sense. I find short stories to be a difficult genre to excel in; for me, short stories need to have a clear point or message or metaphor, the characterization has to be on point and the language must be absolutely crisp and without wasted words for them to make a lasting impression. This did not always happen here which leaves me in this weird place where the sum of this collection's parts was stronger than its parts. I enjoyed reading this book overall, but not the whole time if this makes sense.

I had high hopes for this one and although I appreciated the concept of how the stories were linked I felt it lacking. I felt somewhat disconnected from the characters as you only really 'met' them for about a chapter or so.

This book was ok. It skipped around quite a bit, but overall, it was an ok read. Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book in return for my honest review.