The Darkness Gathers
A Thriller by Lisa Miscione, Featuring Lydia Strong
The Darkness Gathers by Lisa Miscione is a fast-paced thriller with plenty of Glocks and Sigs, but may leave readers asking what they missed when the smoke clears.
The Darkness Gathers is a thriller by Lisa Miscione. The protagonist, Lydia Strong, is a true-crime writer whose mother was killed by a serial killer, and who works freelance for a private investigations firm. The various strands of her life become tangled when she gets involved in the search for a vanished teenager, Tatiana Quinn. Unknown to her, Tatiana’s father has connections which stretch far beyond his opulent home in Miami, and the psychopath who killed Lydia’s mother is unexpectedly up for parole...
Location, Location, Location
Miscione keeps the action coming in The Darkness Gathers – there are enough close escapes, shootings and flavours of psychopath to satisfy the most demanding adrenaline-junkie. The novel’s action moves from New York to Miami and even briefly to Albania, as Lydia Strong investigates Nathan Quinn’s possible connections with criminal gangs trafficking girls into Western Europe for prostitution.
Shoot ‘Em Up
The unfortunate side effect is that the book almost feels too active: as soon as anyone brings Lydia and her partner Jeffrey closer to the truth, they are killed in pretty short order. When Miscione writes “Lydia was beginning to feel like she was in a video game where everyone who came into her view screen died in some awful way”, the reader may end up feeling much the same way. The flicking from scene to scene and from fight to fight hinders any character development, and too many of the characters verge on stereotypes – the computer hacker, the paramilitary, the gangster, the serial killer.
Eastern Europe
Miscione’s involvement in what the end-note calls the “conflicts and challenges” of Albania adds an interesting element to the novel, but it is all rather rushed through, and Albanian characters seem either to be gangsters or victims hoping that “Maybe someone will come to help us.” It’s difficult to take this strand of the novel very seriously, when the trafficking is part of a network of criminal enterprises controlled by a worldwide consortium of powerbrokers called “The Council”, who were members of an Ivy League fraternity. And who all carelessly wear the same signet ring, allowing them to be identified by anyone in the know.
Who Cares Who Wins...
Splicing a serial-killer novel, a conspiracy thriller, and a mystery novel into the same book means that the various elements in The Darkness Gathers refuse to co-operate. The novel lacks the focus and depth of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels, or the intellectual rigour of Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe series – The Darkness Gathers skips too quickly over the genres it touches upon, and risks leaving the reader wondering why they should care.
