Agent for Justice
AGENT FOR JUSTICE ISBN 0-9700476-6-5 Duke Sutherard is a retired educator and now lives with his wife in Tuftonboro, New Hampshire. He grew up in New Jersey, where he taught high school, before becoming an honored New Hampshire educator. A Favor Returned was his first novel. |
Author Duke Southard builds strong relationships among his characters, and skillfully develops the mental decline of his main character, Brad Wallace. Agent for Justice is in a genre all its own revealing much about school educators' lives, and the impact of trying to correct perceived injustices in one individual's life.
Agent for Justice follow the life of Brad Wallace, a devoted high school teacher, who takes on the world's injustices. Wallace enters the teaching profession in the 1960s with heightened optimism. He meets six other colleagues, who form a camaraderie nicknamed 'the magnificent seven.' He marries Josie, one of the seven, at which time the political assassinations and Vietnam deaths of the 1960s begin to inflict Brad with a an arousing feeling of retaliation. Spanning over twenty ears, Agent of Justice tracks Brad's psychological demise.
After his wife experiences premature labor losing their infant son, a distraught Brad places his avenging ploy against her obstetrician who Brad believes is responsible for his son's death. "Black periods" follow intensifying Brad's mental deterioration and estrangement from his wife and colleagues. A string of "accidents" occur along the way, engaging nth esuspicions of Detective Havenot. As Havenot gets closer to the truth, Brad prepares the frightening climax on Lake Winnipesaukee: retaliation against the people who Brad sees as being behind many wrongdoings.
PRAISE FOR AGENT OF JUSTICE
"Agent for Justice truly protrays the heroic work that great teachers do
while effectively demonstrating how an unmitaged idealism leads one man into a
spiraling descent of mental deterioration and madness. The story plays like a
classic tragedy, with a well drawn, sympathetic character fighting his obsession
toward "righting" injustices on his own terms."
Christie Sarles, Author and Library Director