Among the thorny truths that haunt Miriam Herin’s gripping, all-too human novel, Absolution, is that no war is ever over when it’s ‘over.’ Time may heal wounds, but the shards of desperate acts remain invisibly imbedded. The scars that mar the prosperous, smooth-surfaced marriage of pretty do-gooder Maggie Delaney and her Vietnam vet-turned-lawyer husband, Richard, are not of flesh but spirit. And the powers of residual pain lie sleeping — until Richard steps into a drugstore, and is shot by a teenaged stranger with the face of an old enemy. Why? Thereby hangs not one tale, but many, buried threads of old hurts and hidden lives, expertly woven to remind us, over and over — almost nothing is ever quite what it seems.”
Dot Jackson, author of Refuge