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<div><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-3445 noborder" title="promised" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/promised.jpeg" alt="" width="240" height="360" />Bierce was a happily married cop with a bright future. Then one sunny day in July his wife, Miriam, and their young son, Ricky, were savagely beaten to death. Bierce was convicted of the murder of his family. Languishing on Death Row twenty-three years later, he still has no memory of the incident.

With his execution only seconds away, he is suddenly, inexplicably, released. But the world has moved on without him and the city he knew has become a strange and dangerous place.

Returning to the only home he knows, Bierce meets Alice Loong – a tough, half Chinese woman who can guide him through the confusing new world of the twenty-first century. But it soon becomes clear that Alice is hiding dark secrets of her own.

After the horrifying discovery of a corpse nailed to a post outside Bierce’s house, the pair go on the run, pursued by dangerous enemies. Bierce now knows for certain that he was released to be the pawn in some vicious game he doesn’t understand. He knows, too, that he still doesn’t remember what happened the night his wife and son died. And that, perhaps, he is not as innocent as he’d like to think.

<em>The Promised Land</em> was new territory for me, a first person tale that is compelling sequential in nature, an experiment in narrative that is half dream, half nightmare, begging to be read in a single sitting.

It’s a story about feeling old, lost and frightened. And like the Costa series, it’s fundamentally a story about a human being trying to find his way home.

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