Available Dark: A Crime Novel [Hardcover]

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Available Dark: A Crime Novel [Hardcover]

Product Details

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Minotaur Books (February 14, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312585942
ISBN-13: 978-0312585945
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

By : Elizabeth Hand
List Price : ~~$23.99~~
Price : $15.16
You Save : $8.83 (37%)

Customer Reviews

Hand's novel is by turns fascinating and repellent, drug-fueled, disconnected photojournalist Cassandra Neary bearing the scars of her love affair with East Village nihilism, long past her sell-by date, yet still enamored of subjects no longer animated by a life force, her book of images, Dead Girls, a cult collector's item. Her shabby apartment cluttered with memories and the detritus of self-abuse, Cass's gift and burden is an artist's eye for genius, a nirvana rarely reached since those first heady years, the craving for chemicals unchanged. An old photograph of a former lover that arrives in the mail from Reykjavik, Iceland, and an unexpected assignment to evaluate a series of "murderabilia" images being sold by a famous former fashion photographer in Helsinki, Finland, are the catalysts for Neary's journey across the globe, the first to earn much-needed funds, the second to reunite with her soul's jagged mirror-image, Quinn O'Boyle.
"I don't care who's buying the round as long as he pays." Cassandra's cavalier attitude changes when she inspects the famous photographer's extraordinary series of "Yuleboys" (Jolasveinar), Nordic demons traced to the earliest religious beliefs in the area, the photographs priceless in a flourishing black market specializing in the esoterica of perversion. A growing discomfort shadows Cass's every move after viewing the images; as instinct inspires her impulsive flight to Iceland, headlines of brutal murders explode in Finland, the perfectly-ordered world of a genius shattered in a gruesome tableau of battered flesh. Cass navigates the dystopian landscape of an economically-ravished Reykjavik, reconnecting with the elusive Quinn only to discover that murder has followed in a wake of violence, danger her traveling companion, evoking Neary's routinely confrontational response to threat.
Paralleling Neary's emotional state, Reykjavik exists in the absence of light, strewn with vacant buildings and desperate souls. Fleeing a murderer's pursuit, Cass collides with her secret past, enmeshed with Quinn in an unraveling confederacy of voyeurs, a pact of jaded collectors stalking the illuminated death. As in Generation Loss, Hand's sharp prose is as seductive and dreadful as the chemicals flooding Neary's veins, an inanimate camera's eye capturing the fleeting spark of life, the incandescent moment on the bridge between here and there, the ambiguity of perfection and decay. The depraved, the criminal, the indifferent and the mad roar in metal rock cacophony, Cass and Quinn forced into complicity. Provocative and unpredictable, Cass is compelling in her abandon, a heroine with the social sensitivity of ground glass, this time flying too close to the sun, a fate Cass intuits long before her flight to Finland: "The edge where I'd lived for all these years was starting to look like a precipice." Luan Gaines/2012.

Cassandra Neary receives a voice message from Investigator Jonathan Wheedler. It is partly due to this voice message that Cassandra accepts an assignment from Anton Bredahl, a guy she just met over email. The other reason being that Anton wants Cassandra to travel to famed photographer Illkka Kaltunnen's house to assess some art work of his to verify that they are real. Plus, Anton is going to pay Cassandra a lot of money. Cassandra could really use the money and this is a good way to leave town and avoid the Investigator.
Cassandra meets Illkka and views his photos. Everything seems to be going well until Cassandra sees on the news that Illkka has been murdered. Cassandra realizes than that she has been set up but by whom and why?
Ms. Hand is a new to me author. Ms. Hand has a unique style of writing. In what I mean by this is that I felt both connected and disconnected with this story and the characters in an odd, good sort of way. Connected in the fact that I could not stop reading this book as it was different and intriguing but disconnected in the way that it was like I was in the audience watching a movie but never relating to the characters and what they were going through in this story. I felt that the characters deserved what happened to them. Due to their sick and twisted obsession with death and preserving it through a photograph. I would categorize Available Dark as more on the suspense side than I would mystery. Overall, I was intrigued enough by Ms. Hand's writing that I would try her again in the future.