Death of the Black-Haired Girl

Robert Stone s fast-paced new novel… takes as its presiding muse not Conrad or Graham Greene, but Nathaniel Hawthorne… His gift for orchestrating suspense and dramatic scenes so vividly on display in Damascus Gate, his 1998 novel set in Jerusalem and Gaza is deployed here with efficiency and elan. As is his talent for charting his characters psychological and spiritual longings… . The result is at once a Hawthorne-like allegory and a sure-footed psychological thriller. - New York Times

In his fiction, Robert Stone is immersed no less profoundly in envisioning the drama of human evil in action than was the great French Catholic novelist and Nobel Laureate, Francois Mauriac. Not only with his brilliant new novel, Death of the Black-Haired Girl but from the early novels such as Dog Soldiers and A Flag at Sunrise down to later books like Damascus Gate and Bay of Souls, he has demonstrated again and again that he is no less a master than Mauriac of the tragic novel–of depicting the fatal inner workings of revenge, hatred, betrayal, and zealotry–and that, like Mauriac, he is the pitiless guardian of a cast of sufferers on whose tribulations he manages to bestow a kind of shattered mercy.

A multi- layered work of literature with pronounced elements of suspense. - Financial Times

You re reminded of Hawthorne or Greene, rather than any contemporary literary novelists or crime writers. - The Sunday Times

A masterly, insightful and compact rendering of these human beings in turmoil… It’s in a book such as this, at least while we’re immersed in its reverberant pages, that we can find the only place where meaning, as dark as it might be, emerges as a balm against nothingness. Anyone who loves fine fiction has no choice but to read this novel now. - San Francisco Chronicle

A compressed story with the swift metabolism of a thriller - Wall Street Journal

Behind the knowing air of Robert Stone s brilliant, mysterious new novel, a vision lurks of America as a Puritanical, death-haunted country, where casual sins of the flesh stand in for crimes far more ancient and profound [The novel is] a riff on the procedural whose pleasures are deeper than its lean page-count suggests. Stone uncoils these pleasures with taut, often graceful economy . Death of the Black-Haired Girl starts to feel less like Elmore Leonard and more like a descendant of Hawthorne, a moral fable bent on revelation. - The Washington Post