Elaine Cunningham’s novel is a crime / fantasy novel that focuses on Gwen, a disgraced ex-cop turned private investigator on the hunt for a missing girl. The cynic in me suggests that there’s more than a little wish fulfilment in Cunningham’s impossibly cool character. Here’s, essentially, the first introduction to Gwen:
“Sometimes she tried for a traditionally professional image, but today wasn’t one of those days. She wore jeans so snug they looked as if they’d been spray painted on, a sleeveless black shirt that stopped a couple of inches north of her pierced navel, a leather jacket she’d bought second-hand during the Reagan administration, slim-heeled ankle boots, and far too much makeup. Her eyes, which were wide and very blue and slightly tilted at the corners, tended to remind people of Siamese cats. Gwen liked to play down the feline aspect with a few layers of judiciously applied paint, which had the added benefit of making her look older. Or at least, it made her look like a high-school kid who was trying to look older” (26).
The book was published in 2004 but retains the fingerprint of the 90s. Gwen’s style is just soooo coooooool. Gwen was that over-the-top quality reminiscent of Lara Croft in the first few Tomb Raider releases. Gwen’s character, among other things, makes the novel feel dated in turn. It becomes even more obvious when one of her central character quirks is that she hates using computers. The ‘techy’ character in the story at one point has to explain what a USB key is for (which feels even more surreally antiquated when he refers to it as a thumb drive). In addition, when conducting the investigation we get the following glorious line from the technophilic character: “Fingerprints, that’s one thing, but pictures? Even if there was a way to do a computer search on a picture, there’s no database for civilian mugs.” Oh, poor Cunningham, how quaint this reads today!
On the topic of the investigation, there are some moments of intrigue but it’s ultimately marred by two flaws. The more superficial flaw is the timeline: it’s often unclear or overly convenient when events happen. Real life is often nonsequential; while I’m marking, I might get an e-mail from a parent that I need to address and while I’m doing that, my dog might need a walk, and so on. This book sees Gwen zipping around town and issues popping up sequentially—at the end of one meeting, a phone call comes through to give her her next step.
The more critical flaw is in the construction of the investigation and the lack of narrative payoff. I am by no means an expert in the mystery genre, but I feel like what makes the genre compelling and fun is watching the mystery unfold and seeing the character put pieces together to solve the case. Shadows in the Darkness has a trend where people just bring Gwen information. For instance, she’ll interrogate someone who says they don’t know anything, but there are at least two instances where the person returns to her unprompted a few days later to reveal new details, having experienced a sudden and largely unexplained change of heart. Rather than following clues, it feels like Gwen is led through the case via a series of video game sidequests where people just tell her things.
What makes it even more difficult for Cunningham to bring the narrative arc to a satisfying conclusion is that Gwen has magic powers. In the prologue, a character is eye-rollingly revealed to be an elf. Luckily that plot thread is left mostly untouched for half the novel, however, Gwen has psychic powers where if she touches something she can experience memories of other people. She uses that to locate a missing girl early on, and then later her visions help her get to a new clue. It’s frustrating that it is not really Gwen’s thinking or investigative skillset that drives the mystery, but her identity. It comes down to an intrinsic feature of her bloodline that is at the core of the mystery and, in my opinion, that just deflates her heroism.
In turn, there’s a predictability to the story that makes the payoff lacklustre. To give an example, Gwen is on a date with her ex boyfriend and about to take things to the bedroom when she gets a phone call from her techy friend who was doing some investigative work that she outsourced to him. He tells her that there’s something she needs to see and she tells him to wait until the morning. The moment he asked her to come over I knew he’d be dead by the time she got there. Called it. The epilogue reveals a more genuine twist, I suppose, about a secret villain, but even then my reaction was just like, “k.”
I suppose my apathy towards it is fueled by the fact that by the time I had thirty pages left I realized Cunningham was setting up for a sequel. In the final phase of the novel, Cunningham uses a significant amount of time introducing a character and having Gwen bond with him. It felt like a waste when the case was at its most pressing.
Tangentially, this points to an issue with some of the tone of the book that reads as untrue for Gwen’s character. Gwen is driven by a sense of purpose, and yet there are inconsistencies. She is artificially put on pause for her investigation, which coincidentally aligns with the funeral of her former partner, at which she meets his son for the first time and the two share an intimate, vaguely romantic conversation. I just didn’t buy it that she’d be receptive to that scenario. In another, she emerges naked from the shower and there’s a man she barely knows in her house and they just kinda chat about the case. In another scene, Gwen tells an informant that the informant’s contact has died and that the funeral was happening the following week. The conversation literally ends with, “Okay,” and the man walks away. It’s weird. Similarly, the dialogue in the novel strives for a bunch of short, quippy exchanges that sometimes just read inappropriately to the situation. Those same dialogue tropes from a show like CSI: Miami that have been panned and parodied abound here. It seems unrealistic to me that they would be talking about human trafficking and then add some joke about Gwen not liking computers in the middle.
Other than that, the writing is largely competent. There is good clarity to the text, if a little wonky when transitioning between scenes and establishing timelines. There were some moments of solid imagery and figurative language. While the writing is predominantly perfunctory from a stylistic point of view, I didn’t have too many complaints. There were a few strange moments, though, that a more careful editor might have found.
Overall, the book was not as painful as it might have been. It was a reasonably engaging story, I suppose, but it definitely reads more like a TV cop episodic rather than a high art concept film.
When I think about that book sale from oh so many years ago, I mourn the fact that I’ll never experience that same format again. At the same time, I know that I still have some residual books from that day. I think I’ve picked through most of the better ones, but there are a handful of ex-popular fiction books on my shelf that will likely be there for a few more years. I can pretty much guarantee, though, that I won’t follow up with the sequel to Shadows in the Darkness: Shadows in the Starlight.
Meh.
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