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In A Dark Season (2008)

by Vicki Lane(Favorite Author)

3.93 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0440243602 (ISBN13: 9780440243601)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Dell

series

Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mystery

review 1: I'm not sure why I had not read Vicki Lane until now, for I love the mountains around Asheville, North Carolina, where she sets her Elizabeth Goodweather series. I was probably under the mistaken notion that her mysteries were dark and gruesome. Yes, there's dark aplenty, but the gruesomeness is kept within limits tolerable to my squeamishness. The emphasis here is on character, and Vicki Lane does a wonderful job of creating sympathetic and believable characters in a rural Appalachian setting. She has a great ear for the local dialect, while not looking down on the mountain folk. I think she must have taken a hidden voice recorder to a post funeral gathering where she captured the ladies' comments about the food spread as they jockeyed in line to be sure to get a help... moreing of the macaroni and cheese. It was dead on (no pun intended). The story is convoluted, with suicides and murder, missing persons, rape, mysterious fires, and rapacious developers (which almost goes without saying when you're dealing with beautiful mountain land). Vicki Lane manages to keep a lot of balls in the air, and doesn't drop a one, though I felt the final flourish was a bit too fast and neat. The reader knows that somehow all the various threads will tie together. The story reaches into the past to a young man framed for a murder in 1860 and the evil woman who bewitched him. Lane delves into the history of the drovers' road and stands, and it is an old stand, a creepy derelict old house on the river, whose blood-soaked floors and tobacco stained walls exude an evil that has persisted through generations, that is the center of this book. But all Lane's ghosts are not evil, and she has saved one of the best for the climactic scenes at the end. Vicki Lane is a new favorite, and I look forward to reading the next in the series, as well as catching up on the earlier Elizabeth Goodweather books. As they might say in the hills, she tells a right good yarn.
review 2: I have loved Vicki Lane’s Elizabeth Goodweather series from the beginning. I usually love the way she weaves the past with the present and shows how actions resonate from generation to generation and down through the centuries. She has never shied away from the darkest and depravest of crimes though she tends to skirt over the more painfully descript details. In a Dark Season had all of those elements yet somehow it all seemed too much, overwhelming and the tapestry seemed heavy rather than airy, artistic and the perfectly blended story that I’ve come to expect. The book took at least 100 pages to take off and it was a grueling 100 pages, at times I even considered putting the book to the side and trying again later in the fall or winter. The book had too many characters and towards the end they all seemed to jumble together into one giant creature and I found that distinguishing the familial relationships and ties to the past was not only overwhelming me but unimportant to me. There were so many mysteries so many coincidences so many connections that my incredulity was stretched and my logic began questioning not only the motives but the crimes themselves shortly after I closed the book. The plots were so numerous it seemed the book couldn’t possibly end with one installment but somehow it ended and in the end all of the murders, rapes, diseases, false imprisonments, sick children, alcoholism, hate crimes, disappearances, affairs, hidden identities, inheritance questions, relationship questions, blackmail, big business development, police corruption, arsons, paranormal activity and I’m sure more were tied up, solved and completed in a little over 300 pages. The writing was still evocative, beautiful and somewhere within the pages of this book was a great story, actually two or even three great stories. One about past lies and choices that tied into the present and led to bitterness and death and another about losing your family, losing yourself, finding friends and making choices that lead to heartbreak, destruction and death, finally, a story about the loss of small and beautiful open land to developers and the monied class and while all of them were good and well told, heaping and blending one into the other didn’t make for the best read and made this book the one faltering step in an otherwise masterful series. less

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