The Cold Hard Light

“Resonating with a dark, disturbing vision, The Cold Hard Light is an ambitious novel. The story, Andrew Harrison’s psychological struggle, is told with insights and nuances. An impressive accomplishment.”

-Ha Jin, National Book Award–winning author of Waiting

“Christopher Amenta has done something remarkable with The Cold Hard Light: he’s told a crime story that doesn’t make you feel like you’ve heard it all before; a Boston story that actually feels like Boston, and a revenge thriller that affords the hunter, the hunted, and all the tragedies in between the courtesy of a beating heart. Quite a debut.”

-Howard Bryant, author of Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston

“The Cold Hard Light is a fascinating, compelling read—a book that will haunt you long after you finish it. Amenta has a subtle, captivating voice that carries the story beautifully. The characters may remind you of Raymond Carver’s half-beaten, working-class survivors, but they’re caught up in a tale that is early George V. Higgins blue-collar noir. The novel’s Boston, and its modern-day service economy that chews up exhausted gofers without a second thought, is the backdrop for a story of trauma, conscience, hard choices, and the hand of fate. Amenta is a writer to watch.”

-Jack O’Connell, author of Word Made Flesh and The Resurrectionist

“The Cold Hard Light is a stark, Dostoyevskian tale of obsession and the myriad of ways in which hatred corrupts the soul and, bit by bit, chisels away at our humanity. H is a contemporary American grotesque, a modern-day Raskolnikov, shaped and fueled by bigotry, by his own failings, and the very ‘white’ sense of what he is owed in the world and what he believe others have taken from him. Twisted into a paranoid shell of a man, and, like Raskolnikov, obsessed and subsumed by his own hatred and shame, H ultimately exists within a prison all of his own making.”

-Thomas O’Malley, author of This Magnificent Desolation