The glut of manipulated convictions and subsequent retrials running through the news in recent years hints at a strong, timely plot, but this is no transcendent docu-drama or feint at historical fiction. Inside is all about Myrden and his passage through the mean streets, and while those streets are firmly cemented to Harvey's native Newfoundland, the story could easily apply anywhere desperate men, their families, friends and known associates clamour for the spoils of a second chance.

Harvey is a master stylist, whose words and phrasing allow readers to feel his stories as much as cognitively understand their meaning. For Inside he uses short sentences. Very short. Sometimes little more than sentence fragments. They express the thoughts of a man who has spent years in a place where every phrase must be carefully examined lest a carelessly spoken thought earn a new and dangerous enemy.

On the street Myrden still measures his words, surrounded as he is by people who expect something from him. The press expects him to talk. His wife expects to live high from the settlement of a wrongful imprisonment suit. His enemy Manny Grom, who may have committed the crime for which Myrden was convicted, expects him to come looking for revenge. Myrden is still a prisoner inside his own head. Harvey uses those short sentences to communicate what Myrden can least express but what everyone wants to know: how it feels to be Inside.

Dialogue is crisp, hard and fraught with meaning. The kind that sounds real because it's the way you'd like to think you talk. Here's friend Randy going through a closet:
"You want some of these dresses?"
He (Myrden) turned away.
"I wouldn’t mind a few," said Randy. "Yes, here's just the one. Yellow suits my complexion. I've been told as much. Wait a second. That was before a fight."

Just that little bit to give a sense of Randy, a cut-up, self-deprecating but not slow with a quip or a fist, a person best kept as a friend. Myrden may not be guilty of murder, but he's no innocent either. He's lived the life, earned his friends and his enemies. At least Randy doesn't expect much more from Myrden than good company.

It's the characters who want the least from Myrden that challenge him most. Ruth, his lover, only wants to show him the possibilities of his second life. Though he feels he owes his kids, his children don’t appreciate his interference in their lives, while his granddaughter is the embodiment of childish, unconditional love.

How to do what's right? How to fulfill obligations from the past without becoming fate's victim? How to get outside?