Summary
Sid Chambers—inked by the indelible blot of a prison term—drifts into the Miller boarding house like a rumor of smoke, only to collide with Laura Chadwick, a school-marm whose faith in human salvage is as fierce as her chalk-snap discipline. Their lightning-bolt tenderness upends the town’s cluck-cluck morality; they elope to the city’s neon labyrinth, tasting brief Eden inside cheap walk-ups and cheaper dreams until Shadwell—the bulldog detective who once clanged the iron gate on Sid—resurfaces, hungry for the whereabouts of Bob Drake, Sid’s old cellmate turned payroll bandit. Sid’s code of outlaw loyalty costs him another stretch inside, while Laura—newly a mother—recoils from the hereditary shadow she imagines coiled in her infant’s veins, surrendering the child to the bureaucratic void of adoption. Upon release Sid stalks the rain-slick alleys, heart set on murdering the man who caged him; Laura, racing to intercede, discovers her surrendered son ensconced in Shadwell’s own domestic sphere, a twist that cracks her stoicism and melts the detective’s granite heart. In a last-minute covenant Shadwell tears up the warrant, returning Sid to the fragile sunlight of family—an absolution bought less by law than by a woman’s tears.
Synopsis
Ex-convict Sid Chambers, while lodging with the Millers, meets schoolteacher Laura Chadwick, and in spite of his record she believes in him. They are married, move to the city, and are happy. Shadwell, the detective who sent Chambers to prison, tries to obtain information from him regarding a former friend and gang member, Bob Drake, who has committed a robbery; and refusing to cooperate, Chambers is sent to prison again on another charge. Meanwhile, Laura's child is born, and fearing that it will develop criminal instincts she gives it up for adoption. When Chambers is released, he vows to kill Shadwell, and Laura, in her effort to warn him, finds her child in Shadwell's home. Touched by her grief, Shadwell arranges to give Chambers his freedom, and the couple is reunited.
Review Excerpt
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A nickelodeon’s-worth of soot-streaked nitrate still flickers in the vault of memory, and from that ember The Invisible Power rises—Charles Kenyon’s bruised Valentine to the Jazz-Age penal state and to every woman who ever tried to unwrite a bloodline.
Picture 1921: flappers bob their hair, but post-war penitentiaries overflow with men who can’t outrun the ricochet of their fingerprints. Sid Chambers, essayed by the lantern-jawed William Friend, embodies that doomed cohort; his posture is all ..."
