For more than twenty years, the murder of a thirteen-year-year-old boy during racial unrest in rural South Carolina has gone unpunished, unsolved, even uninvestigated. But that changes when Charlotte Times reporter Matt Harper sits down with a fellow who shows up in the newsroom, a guy with a grievance. As he struggles with his journalistic legacy, Harper comes to understand why the investigation must be pursued and why he must be the one to do it—despite the opposition of his publisher, violent threats from mysterious forces who do not want the story told, and the fact that his father is dying. Set in the rich scenery of a Savannah River town that time and justice have forgotten, Grievances is a story of newspapers, murder, and of redemption—for a small Southern town and for Matt Harper.
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Grievances: A Novel
For more than twenty years, the murder of a thirteen-year-year-old boy during racial unrest in rural South Carolina has gone unpunished, unsolved, even uninvestigated. But that changes when Charlotte Times reporter Matt Harper sits down with a fellow who shows up in the newsroom, a guy with a grievance. As he struggles with his journalistic legacy, Harper comes to understand why the investigation must be pursued and why he must be the one to do it—despite the opposition of his publisher, violent threats from mysterious forces who do not want the story told, and the fact that his father is dying. Set in the rich scenery of a Savannah River town that time and justice have forgotten, Grievances is a story of newspapers, murder, and of redemption—for a small Southern town and for Matt Harper.
For more than twenty years, the murder of a thirteen-year-year-old boy during racial unrest in rural South Carolina has gone unpunished, unsolved, even uninvestigated. But that changes when Charlotte Times reporter Matt Harper sits down with a fellow who shows up in the newsroom, a guy with a grievance. As he struggles with his journalistic legacy, Harper comes to understand why the investigation must be pursued and why he must be the one to do it—despite the opposition of his publisher, violent threats from mysterious forces who do not want the story told, and the fact that his father is dying. Set in the rich scenery of a Savannah River town that time and justice have forgotten, Grievances is a story of newspapers, murder, and of redemption—for a small Southern town and for Matt Harper.
MARK ETHRIDGE is a third generation reporter and writer who directed The Charlotte Observer’s Pulitzer-Prize winning investigations of the textile industry and the PTL scandal involving Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Ethridge studied as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and named one of Esquire magazine’s “People Under 40 Who Are Changing America.”
