Présentation de l'éditeur Martin Clark’s most remarkable novel yet is the gripping, complex story of a murder cover-up that wreaks widespread havoc even as it redefines the concept of justice—a relentlessly entertaining saga that delves deeply into matters at once ambiguous and essential. While Gates Hunt chose to fight his abusive father head-on, his younger brother, Mason, eventually escaped their bitter, impoverished circumstances by earning a free ride to college and law school. And while Gates became an intransigent, compulsive felon, Mason met and married the love of his life, had a spitfire daughter, and returned to his rural hometown as the commonwealth’s attorney. But Mason’s idyll is abruptly pierced by a wicked tragedy, and soon afterward his life further unravels when Gates, convinced that his brother’s legal influence should spring him from prison, attempts to force his cooperation by means of a secret they’d both sworn to take with them to the grave. And with his closest friend and staunch ally suddenly threatened by secrets of his own, Mason ultimately finds himself facing complete ruin and desperately defending everything and everyone he holds dear. Intricately plotted and shot through with authenticity, The Legal Limit is a roller coaster of moral relevance. What should govern our actions when family loyalty challenges personal integrity, when the letter of the law defies its spirit, and when fate plays dice with our best endeavors? Extrait The shooting came in October 1984, abrupt and rash, a quicksilver bang. The day it happened, Mason Hunt had spent most of his morning settled into the afghan-covered recliner at his mother’s house, watching a nondescript brown and tan and gray wren fly against the big den window again and again as it tried to punch through the glass, the bird evidently sickly or a bona fide lunatic, remaining behind while its kin abandoned Virginia and migrated farther south. Despite the suicidal thumps and flutters that gained it nothing and left it pitifully outside its hope, the misguided bird never learned a lesson or gave up on its headlong, full-steam shortcut to sanctuary, never stopped, kept at the foolishness for hours. Mason was home from his final year of law school, visiting his mother and enjoying her flapjacks and rich casseroles for a weekend, waiting for his older brother, Gates, to arrive so they could saw up a maple tree that had blown over in the front yard and stack it into winter firewood. By the time Gates pulled in the gravel drive at eleven thirty, Mason had finished two cups of coffee, napped, read three issues of the Stuart Enterprise and carted the kerosene heater from the basement to its spot near the couch, even though there was no fuel in it and the weather wouldn’t turn cold for another month or so. Soon after he heard Gates cut his Corvette’s ignition, Mason noticed that the bird had quit its sallies and was stuck in a holly bush next to the window, one wing draped across a run of green, prickly leaves, its beak gapped, its head listing and its feet dangling, unable to take hold of anything. Gates opened the mudroom door but didn’t move too far past the threshold, let out his neck like a terrapin leaving its armor to get a better view of Mason and his mother. “Hello, Mama,” he said in a voice a few notches above normal. “Gates,” she said, not looking up from her kitchen work. She was peeling green baking apples, circling off the skin in deft turns and cuts that went from stem to bottom without a hitch. “What’re you cooking?” he asked, leaning against the doorjamb. “A pie.” The two words were absolutely neutral, ciphers. “The phone not workin’ where you were at last night?” “I’m sorry; I know I promised I’d call when I can’t make it home. You forgive me?” “It’s common courtesy, Gates—if you’re living under my roof you could at least let me know where you are. Twenty-seven years old, and it’s the only thing I ask from you.” “It won’t happen again.” “Perhaps you
