A Long Way Down

April 22, 2019
At the start of Silvis’s overwrought third Ryan DeMarco mystery (after 2018’s Walking the Bones), the former Pennsylvania state policeman turned PI is leaving the hospital where his estranged wife, Laraine, is being treated after a suicide attempt when he runs into an old high school buddy, Ben Brinker, now the Mahoning County sheriff. It turns out Ben could use Ryan’s help in solving a triple homicide connected to a 30-year-old cold case in their hometown of Youngstown, Ohio. Ryan is reluctant to return to his hometown, unlike his girlfriend and PI partner, Jayme Matson, who’s eager to go there. In Youngstown, Ben’s deputies resent what they consider Ryan and Jayme’s interference, and Ryan’s negative feelings about the place and his grief over his young son’s recent death hinder the investigation. Series fans will gain a greater understanding of the emotionally closed off Ryan, but repetitive action and uninspired dialogue stymie the plot. Hopefully, Silvis will return to form in book four. Agent: Sandy Lu, L. Perkins Agency.

May 1, 2019
Silvis is at it again, striving for a blend of crime story and literature, mutilated bodies and lapidary prose. Fans of Silvis' Walking the Bones (2018) will happily bask in lines like, "You smell the way the Moonlight Sonata sounds on a rainy night." Others will mutter, "Get on with it." Series hero Ryan DeMarco and his colleague and lover, Jayme, are asked to look into a series of grisly murders connected to a sex-and-drug cult that would beguile Aleister Crowley, on whose career as an occultist much of the story is based. DeMarco and Jayme investigate when they're not brooding. This is the era of unhappy law enforcement, and DeMarco takes the prize. He's haunted by his mother's suicide, the death of his son, his ex-wife's attempted suicide, the murder of a friend's family, plus PTSD and memories of his time in Panama and Iraq. It's plenty to brood about, that's for sure, but readers can still luxuriate in the marvelous prose, dark though it may be: "A great black thundercloud full of lightning and drowning rain . . . the void preceding time, the darkness preceding light."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)