FICTION/SUSPENSE

Lisa Trow

Sign of Redemption

Texas Review Press, 978-1680030303, paperback, 240 pgs, $18.95

June 4, 2015

Richie Harrison is a prisoner at Huntsville, ten years into a sentence for armed robbery—a first offense—when he meets Elizabeth McKenna, attorney for Deep Eddy, one of Harrison’s fellow convicts. Harrison claims innocence, claims he’s “forced to live like a slave, a subhuman thing,” but he’s convinced that he’s made a spiritual connection with McKenna, that she sees him as a unique individual, and he’s been “resurrected.”

Soon after this meeting, two of Harrison’s friends die violently in the prison and he takes advantage of lax supervision while on a prison farm work crew to escape. Harrison gets a ride from Giddy, the gay nephew of the local drug kingpin, and quickly and much too easily slips into this crowd, doing odd jobs and enforcement for Giddy’s uncle. After proving his trustworthiness, Harrison is sent on errands to Austin, where McKenna lives, and the stalking begins. Soon he and Giddy move to Austin to operate a storefront for fraudulent tax returns, and Harrison’s obsession with McKenna escalates out of control.

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.

There is much humor in Sign of Redemption: both a black humor, as when Harrison refers to another prisoner as the “short, fat comic book-reading fratricide on E wing” and a lighter touch, when Giddy observes of hipster Austin: “These people got whimsy out the ass.” Trow is also capable of an arresting turn of phrase. Before Harrison’s escape from prison he despairs that he’s forgetting what McKenna looks like, that she would “move from woman to abstraction and from abstraction to muscle memory when, in random moments, my heart might recall the jolt she once gave it.”

Original and unexpected plot twists keep the action moving briskly. Unfortunately, Trow’s plot gets away from her in the last quarter of the book and the conclusion is both disappointing and a stretch of the imagination. The title is misleading—I’m still looking for a sign of redemption for Harrison. But this is a promising debut, and Trow’s sophomore effort will deserve a look.

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