Where the Angels Live to Fight Another Day (crime mystery REVIEW: Deep Into the Dark)

Los Angeles. Whatever you may think about it, it would be hard to name another place that’s home to so very, very many hopes, dreams, and ambitions… or to as much heartache, disappointment, and disillusionment. Everyone here envisions their fantasies taking flight on a magnificent set of wings… but in The City of Angels, such wings are rarely given freely or won easily… and the scrappy, feathery bits that most of us try our best to cobble together? Never manage to feel like quite enough.

And yet, we stay… and more come, from all over, every year: the dreamers and the schemers, the escapees and the seekers, the visionaries and the desperate. (For a place that sees next-to-no lightning [I mean, storms? we’d have as much luck wishing for a stampede of unicorns down Wilshire Boulevard, as we would seeing a thunderstorm], we seem insanely hopeful, as a people, that those electrical bolts are gonna strike, and our dreams all come true.) You see, we don’t cling to those dreams, setback after setback, without some pretty deep wells of patience and determination.

It is within that L.A.—the real one, which exists for some ninety-eight percent of its inhabitants—that P.J. Tracy sets her latest mystery, Deep Into the Dark. 

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In a city of ten million people, a killer on the loose only gets modest attention from your average Angeleno: just another day in La La Land. The situation only becomes more than just another screenplay if you’re one of the few to actually come into contact with a maniac…

LAPD Homicide Detective Maggie Nolan—serious, intuitive, and driven—and her senior partner, Detective Al Crawford—happily-married family man—resignedly cut short an evening off to attend the scene of a murder… the third such atrocity committed over the past couple months, by none other than the madman whom the press have dubbed “The Miracle Mile Monster”. 

Melody Traeger—young, pretty, and tattooed, and with eyes that sometimes hint at a stormy past she’s doing her damnedest to forget—slings drinks at the hip Pearl Club (and takes university psych courses on the side). It’s a standard night for her, busily pouring and serving, while keeping up a steady stream of bantering and flirting with her regulars. Her music-producer boyfriend Ryan, fresh from a trip to Vegas, sits at the end of the bar cooling his heels—glowering—waiting for her shift to end.

Sam Easton—a veteran of the Afghanistan war, with both inner and outer scars to show for it—is working on getting his life back together. His days include sessions with a therapist (for PTSD), trying to get a handle on his anger and depression issues (and eventually, maybe even winning back his wife, Yuki—from whom he’s currently separated), and working as a bar back at the Pearl Club (which keeps him too busy to think about the shitshow his life is, for the duration of each shift). And tonight, well, he’s enduring another one of his frequent nightmares.

A random handful of Angelenos—each as “normal” and as “messed-up” as you’d expect—whose lives are about to crash into each other like an angry surf at high tide. Not all of them will walk away from the collision.

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P.J. Tracy (originally a mother-daughter writing team, now a solo endeavor after the elder’s passing) has been one of my favorite authors since 2003’s breakout Midwestern thriller Monkeewrench hit the shelves, going on to become an irresistible series (with a fabulously-imperfect cast of characters). I’m seriously stoked that her new series, starting with Deep Into the Dark, likewise hits the ground running.

[Curious about the Monkeewrench series? See what I said the fifth book in the series, here.] 

Tracy has a great voice; she’s unflinchingly honest yet also compassionate in her observations, letting her characters tell us—and, more importantly, show us—about themselves. Whether “good” or “bad”, they all come across as real people you could meet, just walking down the street. 

She also has a brilliant sense of place. Whether she’s describing the various neighborhoods of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area (as in the Monkeewrench series) or the widely-disparate ones lying within the sprawling vastness of L.A. County, her words let you know exactly where you are, which gives her stories a special resonance.

Fans of crime novels and detective mysteries should definitely pick up a copy of Deep Into the Dark; its storyteller is the real deal.

~GlamKitty