Past Darkness

January 18, 2016
In the prologue of British author Millar’s gripping if a bit contrived fourth novel featuring Belfast PI Karl Kane (after 2013’s Dead of Winter), an unidentified young woman dispatches an abusive priest before fleeing a religious group home. In the main narrative, Kane wakes up early one morning from his usual nightmares about his mother’s murder to answer a phone call from a female friend he knows as Lipstick, who’s in trouble. Kane rushes over to the hotel where Lipstick, a heroine addict, has been entertaining a john, Graham Butler, who’s turned violent. Kane rescues Lipstick, but his dark past is about to catch up to him via Butler and an apparently unrelated arson investigation. When the arson case takes a surprising turn involving the woman who killed the priest, Kane is forced into a face-off with an old bogeyman, his mother’s killer. Millar blends old-fashioned gumshoe noir with the latest in high technology to build a nail-biter that sneaks up on you.

March 1, 2016
The fourth installment in Millar's Karl Kane series begins with a naked girl taunting an Irish priest. This amazing novel unleashes a torrent of savagery, made bearable by Irish author Millar's considerable literary gifts. He writes of a eucharistic moon with its magnesium glow. There's also the appealing presence of Belfast PI Kane, who shares with his girlfriend a knack for low comedy; the pair becoming a sort of working-class Nick and Nora. Karl has a backstory that beats all. As a child, he was raped by the psychopath who murdered his mother. The psycho is supposed to be in prison, but now he may be out and stalking Kane. Upon this narrative clothesline, Millar has hung gut-clutching descriptions of pierced eyeballs, galled skin, and the taste of rotting food. The novel is a series of horrific incidentskidnapping, blackmailing, torture, murderwhose interconnection is revealed with a crash in the last pages. These moments can leave readers reeling, all the while fully aware of just how talented a writer Millar is.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)