Hello, Sounds of Silence: Darkness, My Old Friend Put Me to Sleep!
Amazon says:
Banes & Noble thinks:
|
Author: Lisa Unger
Title: Darkness, My Old Friend Genre: mystery Willow Graves hates life in The Hollows. That makes sense: she's fifteen, and fifteen-year-olds hate everything (literary fifteen-year-olds, anyway). Since novelist mom Bethany divorced philanderer Richard and uprooted Willow from the friendly confines of Manhattan, life's been a real downer. It doesn't help that she's smarter than her classmates or that her only friend is... low-class. The "big wild man" that Willow encounters in Hollows Woods one afternoon is none other than Michael Holt, whose mother Marla disappeared eighteen years ago. He returned when his father died, and has hired a psychic/PI team to reopen the cold case. Retired cop Jones Cooper is also interested, since Marla's case was one of his first murder cases and the lack of resolution gnaws at him still. Cooper, reluctant neophyte PI, is also on the case of Paula Carr; emotionally-abused wife and stepmother to Cole (the boy of Willow's dreams). Hollows Woods are clearly the center of it all: it's there that psychic Eloise Montgomery's visions are centered, there that Michael Holt obsessively digs, there that Willow runs when her lies catch up to her. To make matters more fun, there's a river that runs through it - at least in the last chapter... Lisa Unger's Darkness, My Old Friend has nothing to do with Simon or Garfunkel. It doesn't have a lot to do with anything, in fact. Unger's semi-mystery novel spins its wheels constantly, slipping in one direction , such as Paula Carr and her control-freak husband; before sashaying in another, e.g., Eloise Montgomery's broken relationship with her surviving child and strange affair with investigator Paul Muldune. And, of course, there are acres of internal dialog from teenaged Willow and middle-aged cop Cooper. The Marla Holt mystery (if you can call it that) could fit in a matchbox: no viable suspect is ever identified, and Unger emphasizes her son's size at fourteen so many times that it's almost pitifully obvious what happened. The Willow affair feels more like a Judy Blume short story than anything else - complete with a long backstory about a skein of lies involving a Britney Spears concert and a boy named Rainer (Rainer?????). The whole psychic thing (except maybe the shoes "bit") is pretty puny in a post-Alison DuBois world. Unger's writing is pleasant and she seems to connect well with her teenage semi-protagonist (but what do I know - I was never a fifteen-year-old girl). Her male characters though, especially the "tortured" Michael and the "searching" Jones, are straight from Central Casting. Where Unger has gone wrong, at least for this reader, is an insistence on getting readers to return to her previous novel(s?) set in The Hollows, 2010's Fragile. From the first appearance of Jones Cooper, she continues to make vague references to his "recent problems" that made him quit the police force. At another point, the psychic muses on the "revelations" she made to Cooper's wife at some unspecified time in her past, which caused Maggie to return to The Hollows - wherever the heck that is (Connecticut? Jersey?). Unger's background in social work does little beyond compel her to write more counselors per page than any author except perhaps Stephen White. Ultimately a lightweight mystery that reads more like a teenager's coming-of-age tale mixed with a cold case, Darkness, My Old Friend not only didn't persuade this reader to go looking for Fragile, it almost didn't persuade him to finish it. It's harmless, but I can't say much else about it... all content copyright © 2001-present by scmrak
|