The Dark Night

At 19, Nora Hesper’s parents were gunned down in a dark alley. Flush with a large life insurance payout, she traveled to Nepal and studied the mystic arts in a mountainside monastery.

Returning to the U.S., she hooked up with Bruce Wayne, Stephen Strange, Danny Rand, and Jethro Dumont to form a chay-drinking klatch of supranatural superheroes.

Or did she? Nora’s memories were a bit fuzzy. Did Himalayan monks really grace her with esoteric powers? Or did she simply read too many Iron Fist comics when she was a kid?

As the crimefighting vigilante known as Indigo, Nora could slip in and out of shadows. Shifting darkness was an extension of her identity and she lived perpetually in the margins of reality. Was it any wonder Nora’s memory was hazy? It was hard to see your past when you were cloaked in shadows.

Putting her comic book-inspired identity crisis on hold for a second, Nora began investigating a string of grisly murders in her neighborhood. She was convinced that an international black magic cult was involved. “The Children of Phonos weren’t just socialite fucks dabbling in magic,” she said. Some of them were vicious, highly skilled killers who had performed blood sorcery 800 years before Mary whelped baby Jesus. In other words, they were the real deal.

But the “Phonoi” weren’t the worst of Nora’s problems. A demon by the name of Damastes had a grip on her too. In fact, Indigo’s shadow powers hadn’t come from a noble place at all. They came from the murder god who reveled in pain and carnage and despair. “Damastes is the source of my power,” she confessed. “He is the coal that burns in the furnace of my heart.”

In order to solve the serial killings, dismantle the Children of Phonos, and smash Damastes, Nora knew that she’d have to dive deep into darkness and find the light. But she wasn’t worried. She was an avenging angel and she wore her shadows like a halo.

It took 10 authors to tell Indigo’s origin story. As a result, the book was filled with a ton of crazy and offbeat ideas. Heck, we didn’t even mention the Eternal Sisterhood of Righteous Slaughter, the heykeli, Caedis, Rafe Bogdani, Sam Loh, and detectives Angela Mayhew and Hugh Symes. All of these characters were at the center of significant sub-plots that zigzagged throughout the novel. Congratulations Team Indigo. Real and fictive, you all did a bang-up job.

[Indigo / By Charlaine Harris, Christopher Golden, Kelley Armstrong, Jonathan Maberry, Kat Richardson, Seanan McGuire, Tim Lebbon, Cherie Priest, James A. Moore, and Mark Morris / First Printing: June 2017 / ISBN: 9781250076786]