Fear the Darkness

Retired FBI agent Brigid Quinn, who was introduced to mystery readers in the Edgar Award-nominated Rage Against the Dying is back. This is good news for those who were captivated by the tough-but-vulnerable 59-year-old protagonist, whose strategy for adapting to both retirement and married life was to follow up on old cases while trying to shield her new husband from the realities of her former career. The Brigid we encounter now is more comfortable in her marriage and further removed from the daily intrigues of law enforcement. And the case that confronts her this time arises from her own friends and family. Unfortunately, Brigid is one of the victims, and the drugs she unknowingly ingests not only hamper her abilities to track down the culprit, but they affect her personality and thus deprive the reader of the uniquely authoritative and comical voice that led us through the first tale. Instead, the reader is saddled with an unreliable and unsure narrator who gropes her way through a confusion of events, and, in the end, must rely on a teenage niece to help her solve the case.