Author: Stephen Leather
Title: Midnight
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Hardback: 473 pages
ISBN: 978-1-444-70066-4
Price: £19.99
Publication Date: 20/01/2011
Having spent his thirty-third birthday battling to save his soul from the demon Proserpine [in 2010’s supernatural-thriller Nightfall], ex-police negotiator turned private detective Jack Nightingale might have been forgiven for thinking he deserved a rest. Unfortunately for Jack [and fortunately for the reader], Hell waits for no man and now he has another soul to save – his sister’s.
Jack never knew this [half] sister existed. Until he receives a DVD from the man claiming to be their biological father – Ainsley Gosling, a Satanist and devil-worshipper who sold both of his children’s souls to demons [thank heavens my father didn’t think of this when I was going through my terrible teenage phase!]. But in order to save this sister he has never met, Nightingale must first find her – a task made increasingly difficult by the fact that the people he talks to keep dying horribly. Inevitably, unwanted police attention follows, not least in the form of Jack’s nemesis, Superintendent Chalmers and Jack finds himself repeatedly pulled in for questioning.
But part of Jack’s appeal is his maverick ways. A little heat from the police isn’t going to stop him from using any means, fair or foul, to track down his sister. And with his heavy-duty smoking habit and dark, laconic sense of humour, Jack reminds me of another occult detective, Alan Moore’s comic book anti-hero John Constantine [which was turned into an execrable Hollywood film, Constantine, with a wooden Keanu Reeves in the title role – but don’t let that put you off the comic book version!].
And from the opening pages of Midnight, when the corpse of a woman who has recently committed suicide begins to speak to Nightingale, the reader knows that they’ve entered a gritty and macabre world that is very different from the type of crime fiction that they’re used to.
But this is not to say that the book is unremittingly dark. For there are a number of welcome and very enjoyable moments of humour throughout the novel, not least in the form of the verbal sparring and tetchy relationship that exists between Jack and his long-suffering assistant Jenny McLean [who, one suspects, continues to put up with Jack’s ‘difficult’ ways only because she is hiding deeper feelings for him].
Sounds just my kind of thing – I love Constantine and all things ‘crime-meets-supernatural’ – just about to read ‘Falling Angel’ which I really should have read by now as I love the movie of it (Angel Heart).
Will seek out Stephen Leather’s books and soon.
and, with the Constantine thing – the comic books are sooo much better than the movie of course.