Breaking New Ground

After The King of Lies and Down River, Edgar-winner John Hart delivers another stand-alone crime thriller, The Last Child (Reviews, Mar. 2).

Your previous two novels featured adult protagonists. Why focus on 13-year-old Johnny Merrimon in The Last Child?

The idea for Johnny came from the opening sequence of Down River, where the hero stops at the river and meets a young boy there to fish. I never named the boy, but he had what, in my mind, was this perfect childhood. He never reappears in the book, but I found myself asking: (1) what could happen to take such a wonderful life away; (2) how would he react to the hardships of his changed circumstances; (3) where would he find the strength to deal with it?

What draws you to explore the kinds of stories where the past is never quite buried?

Everything that makes us who we are is lurking back there somewhere, and time can be a magnifying glass for those things that shaped us. Hurts fester. Love deepens. Strength is born or broken. Using elements of the past can heighten the complexity of the characters, especially in terms of motivation. Old secrets make for explosive secrets. The deeper and darker the better.

North Carolina figures prominently in all of your novels. What draws you to the locale?

The King of Lies and Down River were both set in Rowan County, where I grew up. I know the place well and using it allowed me to concentrate on the parts I needed to make up: plot, voice, character. But there are dangers in setting novels where you grew up. A few people got upset because they thought they were in the books—they weren't. Others got upset because they weren't in the books. For The Last Child, I decided to fictionalize the location. I kept the story in North Carolina, not because the plot required the setting, but because it's fun to think about the place you live, to boil it down and show parts of it to the rest of the world.

Is a series something that you would consider in the future?

At first, I avoided the idea of a series because there are so many great ones out there that I thought I'd be lost in the shuffle. Who wants to compete with Harry Bosch, Lucas Davenport, Kay Scarpetta or Jack Reacher? That seemed like reason enough, but I eventually figured out that I like breaking new ground on new characters. Doing that fresh with each book is one of the great joys for me. I'm just not ready to say, “This is my guy.” One day, maybe.—