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Summary
Summary
Punk photographer Cass Neary, "one of noir's great anti-heroes" (Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love ), rages back in the series that began with the award-winning novels Generation Loss and Available Dark . Fleeing Reykjavik and a cluster of cult murders, Cass lands in London to rendezvous with her longtime lover Quinn, a person of interest to both Interpol and the Russian mob.
Only Quinn doesn't show up. Alone in London and fearing the worst, Cass hooks up with a singer-songwriter with her own dark past, who brings her to the wrong party. Cass becomes entangled with the party's host, Mallo Tierney, an eccentric gangster with a penchant for cigar cutters and neatly-wrapped packages, and a trio of dissolute groupies connected to a notorious underground filmmaker.
Forced to run Mallo's contraband, Cass is suddenly enmeshed in a web of murder, betrayal, and artistic and sexual obsession that extends from London to the stark beauty of England's Land's End Peninsula, where she uncovers an archeological enigma that could change our view of human history--if she survives.
Strobe-lit against an apocalyptic background of rock and roll, rave culture, fast drugs and transgressive photography, Hard Light continues the breathless, breathtaking saga of Cassandra Neary, "an anti-hero for the ages. We'd follow Cass anywhere, into any glittery abyss, and do." [Megan Abbot, author of The Fever ]
Author Notes
ELIZABETH HAND is the author of fourteen cross-genre novels and four collections of short fiction. Her work has received the World Fantasy Award (four times), the Nebula Award (twice), the Shirley Jackson Award (twice), and the James M. Tiptree Jr. and Mythopoeic Society Awards. She's also a longtime critic and contributor of essays for the Washington Post , Los Angeles Times , Salon , and the Village Voice , among many others. She divides her time between the Maine coast and North London.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Last seen in 2012's Available Dark, photographer Cass Neary is a wreck in Hand's loosely plotted third outing for the middle-aged, rock and roll-loving alcoholic and depressive druggie. Having escaped mysteriously from a reunion in Iceland with long-ago boyfriend Quinn, Cass lands in gritty North London with only a backpack, her Konica SLR, random uppers, some cash, and one fake and one genuine passport. From there she stumbles from one squalid flat to another, encountering weirdo after weirdo, expecting Quinn at every turn. Instead, she discovers a body-that of Poppy, a former punk singer, followed by other, possibly related bodies. Later, she winds up in a dilapidated Cornwall farmhouse, where she meets a number of folks with creepy connections to Poppy. Along this dubious route, Cass conveys an expert's knowledge of the 1970s East Village punk scene, Iron Age rituals, Paleolithic icons, and the intricacies of photography and film noir. Somehow it all adds up to a gripping, if unlikely, tale. Agent: Martha Millard, Martha Millard Literary Agency. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
WAR MAKES PATRIOTS of us all - even Mafia capos. Albert Anastasia, a big deal in Murder Inc., enlisted in the Army. Joseph (Socks) Lanza, who controlled the rackets at the Fulton Fish Market, let naval officers work undercover on his fleet. And Long Island mobsters were said to have helped capture saboteurs who came ashore from a German submarine. These and other real-life gangsters appear in THE LETTER WRITER (Knopf, $26.95), Dan Fesperman's dynamic novel set in New York during World War II. One of these superpatriots was Meyer Lansky, who arranged for Mafia dons to coordinate their war efforts with Frank Hogan, the New York district attorney, and Charles (Red) Haffenden, from Naval Intelligence. This irregular alliance provides a learning experience for Fesperman's fictional sleuth, Detective Sergeant Woodrow Cain, a transplant from rural North Carolina. On his first day on the job, he's assigned to fish a murder victim out of the Hudson River, the ninth floater that week and one of some 700 a year. What better introduction could the city offer? Seeing New York through Cain's eyes gives us a bracing new perspective as his efforts to identify the corpse take him from the German enclave of Yorkville in Upper Manhattan to the tenements of the Lower East Side, where a mysterious man called Maximilian Danziger performs a unique service. Old and frail but vibrantly alive in Fesperman's penetrating portrait, Danziger charges a modest fee to write letters for illiterate clients frantic for news of their relatives back in Eastern Europe. "He's the last link to everything they've left behind," a friend says. "Their families. Their pasts. If he disappears, so will all of that." Fesperman's prose is almost photographic, creating vignettes saturated with color and humming with life. It puts us on the scene at Longchamps, where dapper mobsters dine in style; then down on the Bowery, where hard-luck cases live in sad hotels like the Sunshine; then on to the morning bustle of the markets, where the city greets the dawn. IT'S A SIGN of big trouble in Christopher Charles's mystery THE EXILED (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) when Wes Raney, the only homicide detective for miles in this part of New Mexico, drives onto Jack Wilkins's 1,000-acre spread and finds a cattle ranch with no cattle, but a Jaguar in the garage. The three corpses (one of them Wilkins's) in an underground bunker tell an ugly story of murder and vengeance. But it's the theft of 10 kilos of cocaine that puts Raney in mind of what he came west to forget - his history as an undercover New York narcotics cop who succumbed to the lethal product. Not that he stands a prayer of losing his former identity: "He'd been out west almost two decades and still the locals knew at a glance." There's no doubt that Charles, a pen name of Chris Narozny, can write. (Ordered to humiliate an opponent in the boxing ring, Raney aims to "make him look as threatening as a middle-aged man staring out the window of a commuter train.") But with a split-focus narrative and two time frames, the haunted-hero theme wears thin - twice. WHERE ARE THE punks of yesteryear? "I'm... one of those living fossils you read about who usually show up, dead, in a place you've never heard of," says Cass Neary, a photographer who admits to "substance abuse issues" if not a full-blown death wish. Elizabeth Hand's HARD LIGHT (Thomas Dunne/ Minotaur, $25.99) finds her antiheroine warily approaching customs and immigration at Heathrow after flying out of Reykjavik on a fake Swedish passport to avoid being charged as an accessory to murder. Cass's erstwhile lover, Quinn O'Boyle, has also fled the country, and has arranged for her to contact him at a bar in Brixton. A couple of bars later, she finally finds her connection - but no Quinn - in Camden Town, "where punk had gone to die its slow death." Somehow she hooks up with a gifted (and doomed) singer improbably named Krishna Morgenthal, who introduces her to some rich old hippies at the center of a drug-fueled party scene. There's intelligence and style, if not much shape, to the plot, which concerns stolen artifacts being traded on the black market. But Cass's voice, as deep as a dungeon and as dark as a grave, is addictive. ALTHOUGH PLENTY of children run around in crime fiction, it's not as often that you see older teenagers like 18-year-old Tessa Lowell, the narrator of Kara Thomas's THE DARKEST CORNERS (Delacorte, $17.99), a novel written for young adults that has the crossover appeal of a conventional mystery. After a long absence, Tessa returns to Fayette, Pa., to see her dying father, only to learn that she and her best friend, Callie, identified an innocent man as the killer known as the Ohio River Monster back when they were 8 years old. Yet nothing about the investigation into a fresh murder is as interesting as Tessa and Callie, who consider themselves grown-ups but keep regressing into childish ways. Their excruciating self-consciousness is a clear giveaway, as are their on-again-off-again friendships and their preference for texting. "I don't understand why society still insists on voice calls when everyone hates them," Tessa complains. And I don't understand why more mainstream crime writers aren't making use of this fascinating age group.
Library Journal Review
Award-winning, genre-spanning author Hand uses her worldbuilding skills to spin a new Cass Neary story (after Generation Loss and Available Dark). This time the photographer and adventuress is roaming the streets of London, experiencing both high (in every sense of the word) and low society. Hand writes about both sides of the lane expertly, dispensing art, photography, and rock music tidbits throughout the narrative. We see Cass soften just a little and even grudgingly accept "new" technologies such as smartphones and digital photography, but fans of the edgy, druggy, rough-and-tumble antiheroine will not be disappointed-she's still got plenty of attitude. Quinn, her long-lost outlaw lover, has sent her to London on a sketchy passport, promising to meet her there. When he doesn't show, Cass's street instincts kick in and she bunks with a ragamuffin singer (think Amy Winehouse) and meets her spooky friends. Cass's nosing around lands her in hot water with an art (drug) dealer and then the race is on. Running from danger, she encounters former groupies, witchy hermits, scary street people, a lost underground film, and a possible protegée. Quinn even appears briefly, though he is more a MacGuffin than character in this story. VERDICT This great adventure story starring a troubled but intriguing protagonist will please Cass fans, those who like their kick-ass heroines north of 22, and readers who fancy a walk on the wild side. [See Prepub Alert, 10/19/15; "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/15/16; library -marketing.]-Liz French, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
