The Dark Place

November 9, 2009
While Millar’s second gritty crime novel featuring Belfast PI Karl Kane (after Bloodstorm
) doesn’t have the same punch as its predecessor, readers with an appetite for gore will be engrossed. Soon after Kane agrees to look into the case of an alleged runaway, Martina Ferris, a friendly pathologist tips off Kane that he’s examining two corpses whose profiles match Martina’s and whose liver and kidneys have been removed. If that barbarity isn’t enough, the victims’ bodies carried too much weight for their skeletons, suggesting that they were force fed. Once a chief suspect emerges—Bobby Hannah, son of a renowned surgeon, who shot his mother to death, allegedly by accident—Kane and Hannah engage in a cat-and-mouse game that strikes increasingly close to home for the detective. While it’s hard to come up with much new in a serial killer plot, Millar distinguishes himself from many of his contemporaries in the genre with taut writing and a memorable lead character.

January 1, 2010
In the 1930s, Raymond Chandler created the quintessential hard-boiled private eye, Philip Marlowe, drawing on Depression-era hard times to set the dark, sometimes desperate tone. Over the years, much of that darkness has been lost in hard-boiled fiction, with latter-day Marlowes like Robert B. Parkers Spenser spending as much time in the kitchen as walking the mean streets. Millars private eye prowls the alleys and lanes of Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the ambience returns the hard-boiled novel to its tonal roots. In The Dark Place, a wisecracking Karl Kane sets out to find a teenage girl gone missing. The bodies of similar young women have turned up minus various organs and with disturbing evidence of having been fattened, like foie gras geese, in order to be consumed by a mad aristocrat. Matters worsen dramatically when Kanes own daughter goes missing. This is hard-edged crime with a vengeance, but it is handled with a finesse and deftness that Chandler devotees will admire greatly.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)