Redemption Initiative: The Good Samaritan by C.L. Morrissey
C.L. Morrissey’s debut novel Redemption Initiative: The Good Samaritan is an evocative and compelling read that stays with you beyond the last page. Showcasing intimate familiarity with the criminal justice system, the story pulls no punches. A reformed criminal who finds his own redemption “by dragging others toward it” launches a bold new rehabilitation recipe for solving crime in Los Angeles. It is born of a simple question: “What if those arrested today could fully grasp the long-term impact of their crimes?…If they knew the endgame…regret, remorse, and years lost in prison, would they save themselves before it was too late?”
Desi Delgado, a recovering drug addict and ex-con, is living proof that criminals can be rehabilitated. He credits three tenets for his success: stay sober, commit no crimes and find a way to restitution, paying it forward or back. Over the last three decades his halfway house and the businesses he owns—in the fictional neighborhood of Ambrose Heights—have brought solid economic growth to Los Angeles streets. But in the last four years, Desi has built something much bigger. With the help of secret investors and a no-nonsense judge, he now directs a covert agency called Redemption Initiative (RI), designed to be a radical rehab center for parolees. While criminals in prison must focus on survival, RI promises true rehabilitation: changing the minds and futures of those same criminals.
After twenty successful graduates, Desi can’t convince the judge to send RI more hardened criminals. The ramifications of such candidates failing could ruin this judge’s career. Is it too risky to endorse a candidate who is only looking to get out of a prison sentence early and may have no capacity for redemption? Haunted by the crimes he committed long ago, Desi is willing to accept that risk. Will the judge come around?
Besides Desi, the novel offers a colorful hodgepodge of characters—their “instincts shaped by their own bruised histories”—that makes RI tick. There’s a former social worker who can “sense the fracture point between compassion and delusion.” An FBI agent pulled from black ops. A professor of ethics. A prodigy from the gaming world who’s just left a gig at Homeland Security. A behavioral psychiatrist. And the candidates themselves, for whom every minute of the RI journey is a struggle.
Alternating between third-person-close points of view—Desi, members of his team, and various candidates—makes for a pacing that does not let up. As Desi says, “everything breaks before learning its limits,” the challenge being to ensure a candidate is not pushed too far. An intense climax threatens lives and jeopardizes the RI program itself, showing that the success of any of these efforts is not guaranteed.
All things considered, the gritty realism of Redemption Initiative: The Good Samaritan gives us reason to hope. Desi Delgado is honest with himself. “Criminals are eating the city alive…RI is the chemo that eradicates the disease. And like chemo, it will harm before it heals.” But his hope for the RI effort is infectious too. We leave the story believing and hoping, as does its author, that positive and powerful “change could take root if someone kept tending it.”
About C.L. Morrissey:
