As may be inferred from the title, this is a book with a bit of a grounding in the Lovecraft oeuvre.
Daniel Carter is a cop, and a good one, right up to the point he and his partner finally hunt a child-snatcher down to his lair. Seeing the serial killer's "wall of crazy", his partner leaves the world by way of his service revolver, leaving Carter behind to struggle on. He doesn't manage, and ends up a Private Investigator. Now, six months on, he receives an inheritance from someone he's never heard of, and finds himself the owner of a bookshop, and the employer of its only member of staff, Emily Lovecraft.
Yep, that name is significant. She's a distant descendant of the author.
And if that wasn't weird enough, fragments of his last great case keep coming back to haunt him in the form of a mathematician who has more control over probability than you might reasonably expect.
Carter finds himself dealing with unexplainable murders, hints of a hidden world and people who aren't very shallow. While attempting to run a bookshop and in conflict with his mathematical nemesis. Who annoyingly never once says "your number's up!"
Carter and Lovecraft have a fun dynamic, reminding me of no-one so much as Kenzie and Gennaro from the Dennis Lehane series. They're both clever, pro-active characters, who aren't afraid to face a problem head on, even when that problem has too many heads, and more than a couple of gills. (The various villains are very intriguing.)
For all Carter's attempts to play down the tropes of the Private Eye whenever he finds himself interviewing people, this is a book that runs nicely close to the traditional, calling on Spade and Marlowe (which is a book I'd definitely read). The action is visceral and fast-paced, with excellent tension building and a powerful ending, set in a world that's been knocked at an angle to our own.
I picked this up because I spotted the sequel was out at the end of last year and thought I'd best read this first. Will definitely now be grabbing the sequel.
Highly recommended.
Tagged: Book Urban fantasy Lovecraftian Novel Print