Light Before Day

Adam Murphy is an alcoholic, drug-addicted reporter living in Los Angeles. He writes puff pieces about figures whose scantily-clad cover pictures are what his editor thinks makes the magazine sell. Meanwhile Adam dreams of being an investigative reporter. Then he hears about a friend's encounter with a marine helicopter pilot which makes him suspect the helicopter's crash into the Pacific was pilot suicide rather than pilot error. Adam teams up with a mystery writer breaking into the true crime market to investigate.

After about 50 pages into this book I was thinking, "This is all very depressing. Do I really want to read this?". However, once the investigation actually got going the plot had lots of twists and turns and the book was unputdownable. ( )

A struggling journalist named Adam gets wrapped up in a horrific ring of deception, murder and greed as he searches for a lost flame that mysteriously disappeared. All the while a woman searches for the man responsible for the accidental death of her mother during a meth lab explosion.

Christopher Rice's first two books left indelible images in my mind, either due to the horrific nature of particular scenes (The Snow Garden) or because the characters seemed to jump out of the pages (Density of Souls). This one didn't have either of those things going for it. It was a decent enough mystery novel, if not a bit convoluted and overly complicated, but nothing came out of left field to surprise me or leaving me breathless.

The writing itself is great, per usual, despite a tendency for characters to wander off and disappear for hundreds of pages at a time before wandering back in because they're suddenly important. The story of the woman searching for the cause of her mother's murder disappeared for so long that I forgot about it until suddenly the story jerks over to a convenience store somewhere far away from the bars and mansions of West Hollywood. Gay porn star Nathan gets Adam started on his horrific journey down the rabbit hole only to disappear until he's strategically needed 150 pages later. Perhaps it was due simply to the large number of characters that had a pivotal moment within the complex mystery that they couldn't all be featured regularly, but I still found myself looking back to remember who certain people were with they randomly reappeared.

Once the two apparently convergent story lines merged, the story flew by. Caroline and Adam are perfect foils of each other, her violence and aggression balancing out his fear and morbid curiosity. The outcome wasn't completely predictable, due to the culprit's motive more than his actions.

I was just left a little disappointed because Christopher Rice has written books that are still ingrained in my memory years later, and I don't think this one will be well remembered in a few months. ( )

Light Before Day starts out slow and tries to build to something, but it skips right over being a page-turner and jumps straight into the implausible and over-done action. But what could have been a good mystery/thriller or could have been a good piece about the shady underbelly of the drug-induced party scene was instead turned into an almost-good story marred by pretentious attempts at being serious literature. ( )

Well, quite a page-turner, this one. Of course we're confronted with a hell of a lot of cliches, but who cares meeting an ex-drunk as a hero, drug-addicted gays en pedophile men when the story keeps you reading.
Adam, the hero, quits drinking (finally) and starts to unriddle the mysteries about his short-term boyfriend who disappeared. It looks as if a lot of people got entangled in a mysterious web of sex, crime (but no rock'n roll - it's too gay for that).

This really is an interesting read for a lazy Sunday (or every other day) and Rice knows who to build up tension. The only thing I hated were those odd and silly comparisons that probably were supposed to be literary and witty. Believe me, they are not! So, the lights on a boat just don't appear as if they just came from a Rembrandt painting... How far fetched is this.... ???

But if you manage to leave out those little diversions and some superfluous descriptions, you will have a hell of a good time with this mystery story. I'm looking forward to read his next story. ( )

Still not great literature and probably won't last like his mother's works, but nevertheless the story pulls you along much better than the previous two novels and gives you a few satisfying thrills.

Read more at: http://www.i-reports.info/b/B200808.html ( )