REVIEW: SIGN OF REDEMPTION by Lisa Trow

I reviewed Sign of Redemption (Texas Review Press) by Lisa Trow for Lone Star Literary Life! This is Trow's debut novel and a pretty good one. From the review:

Sign of Redemption is the first novel from Lisa Trow, a journalist, poet and former creative writing teacher in Texas prisons. The speed and ease of Harrison�s assimilation into a criminal life after his escape from Huntsville is curious�did prison unhinge him, was the affinity always there, or did he simply have no other choices? However, there were warnings of his obsession with McKenna immediately; Harrison imagines, on the day he met her in prison, her husband and musing that his �days with her are numbered, and I smiled upon him, knowing the three of us would one day know that no matter who he was, I was the better man.� 

Trow�s characters are individuals with backstories that believably inform their present actions and motivations. Harrison is particularly complex, his family history, pathology and sense of entitlement gradually coming to the fore. His devolution as his obsession with McKenna deepens is a skillful and viscerally eerie portrait of a twisted, tangled mind descending into madness.

Please click here to read the entire review.