There is a rich tradition in America of the Southern Gothic novel. Generally placed in a rural setting, Southern Gothic fiction frequently involves genteel, patrician families operating within a semi-feudal society that flourished in the 19th century on the coastal plains, and in more contemporary times has featured older families trying to hang on to that bygone era.

It is a genre wonderfully suited to writers of mystery fiction, just as was its antecedent, the Gothic novel of 18th-century England (exemplified by such works as Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Horace Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto”).

Primary elements a reader can expect are a damsel in distress, a knight in (figurative) armor, a large, architecturally interesting building (often decrepit), a seriously flawed, even grotesque, character, and secrets from the past that haunt the present. In the modern gothic, supernatural elements have been replaced by violence, lurking evil and suspense. The best of these novels frequently have a lush, discursive, leisurely style that allows affectionate descriptions of natural beauty or revulsion at its disappearance, rewarding the patient reader with some of the most elegant prose in American literature.

Few contemporary authors equal or surpass John Hart in these elements. His second book, “Down River” (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 325 pages, $24.95), was recently forced into my hands by several perceptive readers who told me how much they loved his first novel, “The King of Lies,” which I am now hungry to read as well.

Here is the opening paragraph, which convinced me that it was something special:

The river is my earliest memory. The front porch of my father’s house looks down on it from a low knoll, and I have pictures, faded yellow, of my first days on the porch. I slept in my mother’s arms as she rocked there, played in the dust while my father fished, and I know the feel of the river even now: the slow churn of red clay, the back eddies under cut banks, the secrets it whispered to the hard, pink granite of Rowan County. Everything that shaped me happened nearthatriver. Ilostmymotherin sight of it, fell in love on its banks. I could smell it on the day my father drove me out. It was part of my soul, and I thought I’d lost it forever.

The narrator, Adam Chase, was driven from his North Carolina home — and his river — by his father and by a town that believed him guilty of a murder he didn’t commit (and of which he was acquitted), in spite of the firm, undeviating eyewitness testimony of his stepmother, who swore she saw Adam that night.

Adam travels as far away as it is possible to go in America, if not in miles then culturally and psychologically, settling in New York City. “New York with someone you love,” he later mused, “is better than the same city alone. Ten times better. A thousand. But it wasn’t home.” When an urgent phone call comes from his best friend, pleading with him to come home, he agrees, finding his friend disappeared and himself rebuffed by members of his family and most of the town.

As Adam searches for his old friend, he is surrounded by violence, hostility, and eventually murder. His hopes of reconciliation with the father who spurned him prove difficult, and his relationship with his flamboyant brother and timid sister take startling turns.

One mark of a genuinely accomplished writer is the ability to introduce a large cast of characters and provide each with his or her own distinct personality, and to make them real enough that, while one either likes or dislikes them, the possibility for a change of heart exists because they are complex enough to be neither black nor white.

Mr. Hart does this impeccably, bringing no one on stage who doesn’t have an important role to fill — their pasts, present, and futures woven into a tapestry more complicated than across word puzzle for a dyslectic. As with so many outstanding mysteries, “Down River” successfully erases the line between crime fiction and general literature. Rich with traditional elements of detective stories — family secrets, least-likely suspects and red herrings — it is equally abundant in the poetic language, striking imagery, and layered subtexts of America’s most significant books and authors.

If you value Harper Lee, James Lee Burke, Truman Capote, and Michael Malone (which, as a literate American, you are assumed to do), it’s time to add John Hart to your bookshelves.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.