Bill Loehfelm's second novel is a winner

Bill Loehfelm's second novel, "Bloodroot," is both a suspenseful crime story and the saga of a troubled Irish-American family.

Kevin Curran, who narrates the tale, is a history professor at a third-rate college on Staten Island. Lonely and bored, he's just drifting through life. He's too timid to try anything new, including taking a chance with his secret crush.

Kevin has been like this ever since his younger brother, Danny, surrendered to heroin and vanished. But suddenly Danny is back, clean and inexplicably prosperous. Kevin is thrilled, but he is also fearful of what might lie behind Danny's nice clothes and bulging wallet. Soon, Kevin discovers that Danny has traded one evil for another.

As Kevin tries to save his brother from himself, he is drawn into a web of corruption, organized crime and murder.

The plot plays itself out against a background of dark family secrets that have shaped three generations of the Curran family.

"Bloodroot" has the kind of furious pace that reviewers call "a page-turner," but no one is likely to read this superb novel in one sitting.

The story is so emotionally wrenching that it forces you to pause to catch your breath. The prose, alternating between gritty and lyrical, is so superb that you'll find yourself reading slowly to savor it.

Occasionally, Loehfelm mixes the gritty and the lyrical in a single passage to remarkable effect. Here, for example, Kevin is being driven over the Verrazano Bridge to Brooklyn after reluctantly participating in an unspeakable act of violence. "Far below me, the ruby and white lights of the bridge shimmered. ... The steel cables rushed by like the bars of a cage, of a jail cell. Every time oncoming headlights swept through the car I sank deeper into the back seat, hiding from the eyes of the drivers. The dark void over southern Manhattan choked on stars."

Loehfelm had a brilliant debut with "Fresh Kills" last August. "Bloodroot" is even better. With it, Loehfelm joins the ranks of our finest literary crime novelists, his first two books deserving of a place on the shelf beside the best of Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos.