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Dark Road Rising

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Jazzy nightclubs, cold city streets, hard-nosed gangsters, and a Philip Marlowe-style P.I. and his likable partner.

P.N. Elrod certainly knows how to write noir -- and the fact that her stories include vampires and ghosts doesn't dampen their appeal. Picking up where her last novel left off, "Dark Road Rising" is a solid addition to one of the oldest urban fantasy series -- a solid noir mystery that mingles period flavor, glamor-free vampires and gritty bloody action. It's a bit overlong, but a very enjoyable story.

After a fightfight with a suicidal Jack, Escott is half dead in the hospital, and the vampiric detective is understandably wracked with guilt over what he's done to his best friend. What's more, Jack is currently babysitting another vampire, the former mobster Gabe "Whitey" Kroun. Kroun is an underinformed, brand new vampire, and a bullet in his head has handicapped his supernatural abilities. Though Jack doesn't want to get any further involved with the local gangsters, he finds himself being entangled with them because of Kroun.

At the same time, Kroun is being haunted by his memories of his half-forgotten death, and is determined to figure out who did it, who was there, and who else may have died that night. The problem is that Kroun's vampiric nature is become unstable, with a homicidal "thing" that tries to kill Jack after a car crash -- and someone is determined to capture Jack, with a horrific scheme that may shatter his fragile psyche once and for all.

P.N. Elrod's been writing her vampire-noir novels for longer than just about any other urban fantasy writer, but "Dark Road Rising" is perhaps the most intense and harrowing of the Vampire Files. Things have gotten genuinely nasty -- one of our heroes has been tortured to the point of suicide and lost many of his powers, the other is hovering close to death in a 1930s hospital, and despite all this there's still some crimes and mysteries to get solved.

And Elrod writes like a vintage noir writer, except with vampires -- a stripped-down, sharp-edged style with a sly sense of humor. More Raymond Chandler than Anne Rice, especially with the stripped-down dialogue ("Nothing to worry." "Body in the trunk." "Relax, dammit!"), tense action scenes, and the mingling of gangster-style intimidation with vampire mind-whammy. The middle section of the book is rather slow, but Elrod twines together various dark subplots and personal conflicts, while handling it from two different perspectives (both Kroun and Jack get their say).

Jack himself is like a cracked glass ornament that's been Superglued together -- he can still function as a good PI, but having been tortured to the point of attempting suicide, he's still fragile and could easily smash apart once again. Not a good time for him to be wracked with guilt over Escott (who is reduced to a minor but pivotal presence). And Gabe serves as a good counterpoint to Jack, as a handicapped vampire who is haunted by his past life and his traumatic death -- he's not a terribly nice guy, but he somehow becomes likable.

"Dark Road Rising" is a dark, intricate and action-packed noir story -- Jack sounds like a young Humphrey Bogart with blood in his icebox. The middle's a bit slow, but otherwise a brilliant new entry in the Vampire Files.