“The Cold Hard Light is a stark, Dostoyevskian tale of obsession and the myriad of ways in which hatred corrupts the soul and, bit by bit, chisels away at our humanity. “H” is a contemporary American grotesque, a modern-day Raskolnikov, shaped and fueled by bigotry, his own failings, and the very “white” sense of what he is owed in the world and what he believes others have taken from him. Twisted into a paranoid shell of a man, and, like Raskolnikov, obsessed and subsumed by his own hatred and shame, “H” ultimately exists within a prison all of his own making.”

— Thomas O’Malley is the author of This Magnificent Desolation and, with Douglas Graham Purdy, the Boston Noirs, Serpents in the Cold, and We Were King

“Christopher Amenta has done something remarkable with The Cold Hard Light: he’s told a crime story that doesn’t make you feel like you’ve heard it all before; a Boston story that actually feels like Boston, and a revenge thriller that affords the hunter, the hunted, and all the tragedies in between the courtesy of a beating heart. Quite a debut.”
— Howard Bryant, author of Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston