I feel like I have a much longer review that I want to write--and hopefully, I will--but the Reader's Digest version is that Lehane produced another sharp, page-turner that shows more of the lyrical touches I saw in Shutter Island without losing the voice that is so specific to these protagonists. Darkness is another story that could have gone terribly wrong, this time with sexuality and sexual orientation, rather than race, but Lehane has both a light touch and no-nonsense approach that is both pitiless and feels, at the same time, without judgement. Though I think Lehane has ideas that he wants to communicate and transmit through his stories, they feel humanist, rather than bogged down in the specifics of any one identity.

Similarly, I think Lehane has a very understated way of showing and talking about class (with its intersection with poverty and relative morality brought about thereof) that...is possibly too subtle for a lot of readers, especially readers so far outside that experience, that realm, but that reads both realistically for me and sets this series apart from other offerings that seem to do a lot more pearl clutching and tongue clucking. And, while on the one hand, I dread--a little bit--further exploring a universe so claustrophobic with darkness that so little light seems to penetrate at all...on the other hand, I'm excited to see what those few rays illuminate.

My one big complaint about the series so far is that I really hate when I'm presented with a female character that I feel as though the author wants me to like her but, at the same time, how she's written prevents me from liking her, much or at all. I want very much to like Angie; it seems clear to me that Lehane is as much in love with her as Patrick...and yet, I find her both an opaque character and a fairly unlikeable one and it's very frustrating. I feel like both books so far suffer a bit from the idea that no one is quite as clever as Patrick, but that problem seems especially glaring to me with Angie, who is supposed to be his partner and presumable equal...and yet brings nothing (that I see) to the table that Patrick doesn't. As well, the fact that she's often/usually set up as the naysayer against Patrick's soft heart doesn't make her any more endearing. And while I can posit that some (or all) of her opacity comes from the fact that Patrick is dumb as a bag of hammers when it comes to Angie, and possibly sees her more ideally than 'reality' (there's a fully developed character in there, really!), the books (so far) are in first person POV through Patrick's eyes, and unless that changes, I'm not sure how my viewpoint on her can change, either.