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 show more unputdownable. show less

Twenty something and openly gay, Adam Murphy has hopes of being a serious investigative reporter, but any attempts in his present job are frustrated by his boss. But troublesome events in the Los Angeles gay community soon take over, events that cause him to loose his job but at the same time open the way to a new opportunity as assistant to best selling author James Wilton. Wilton wants Adam to investigate these events as potential material for his next novel. Adam soon finds himself not just investigating but directly involved in a complex web of murder, internet pornography, blackmail, drugs and child abduction.

I was a little wary of Christopher Rice, thinking maybe there was more hype than substance here, and when I started reading show more it seemed my impressions were confirmed, I could see no direction or reason, just dead ends. But then it all started to come together, and soon we were involved in an intricate and perplexing plot that gradually drew all these loose ends together. Adam proved to be a plucky, intrepid and likeable investigator, ready to reassess his interpretation of the facts as they unwound and at times proved his early deductions false - as they frequently did. So too I must reassess my view of the author, I really enjoyed this, finding it involving on more than one level; I definitely will be reading more of Christopher Rice. show less

I've tried to read several of Rice's previous books but could never get too interested in them. This one was different. I truly loved the main character Adam. He's smart, strong, I felt safe reading about him. He wasn't going to do something overly foolish. To say Rice has a way with words would be a cliche and an understatement. They say all the stories have been written, and maybe they have. It's hard to come up with something new, but even harder to come up with a new way to say it. Rice does this. No cliche goes untwisted, into his own choice of words right for his characters. It's a refreshing read, because you haven't heard all the lines before.

On a scale of 1 to 10, a 8.5.

Chris Rice's fiction finally grows up. The thinly disguised author self insert is a journalist in LA this time, an alcoholic suffering from frequent blackouts.

The New Orleans connection and the nutjob mother are both still there. Maybe in the next book, we can do without those? Maybe? Please?

It's in the genre of LA detective stories, only a lot more gay. The story is set among West Hollywood's gay community, and exposes the horrifying truth about the consquences of the club scene's methamphetamine trend.

Children are dying so other people can party.

The protagonist sets out, with his mentor, a gruff (and straight) middle aged author of hardboiled detective novels, to find missing men, missing boys and expose a shocking secret show more involving a very wealthy man.

His author friend is really quite amusing, a great foil for the narrator.

The further into the plot you get, the more disturbing it becomes.

Readers also get to watch the protagonist morph from a self indulgent, drunken loser to an independent, mature man who is able to care for someone even more helpless.

Once again, Rice slips in a tiny bit of his knowledge of art history toward the end (watch for it, it's subtle this time).

I will say however, that the plot is extremely convoluted and requires your total concentration to be able to keep up with it. I've read this book twice and I'm still not sure I totally understand everything that happened. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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.

3 1/2
A dark, twisted tale about meth, drug/alcohol abuse, child abuse and exploitation, murder and a number of ucky things that draws in our MC, Adam, into a mystery that nearly gets him killed.

Definitely looking forward to reading more of Mr. Rice's books.