In The Darkest Place, author Daniel Judson tells the story of a writer-turned-college professor who finds himself tangled in web of mysterious murders, an attractive prostitute, another lover who is a married woman, and a couple of private investigators who try to save him from himself. The story is set on eastern Long Island, in the seedy part of the Hamptons, during a record cold snap where the temperature hardly ever exceeds 0F.
This story was extremely well constructed. Judson has layered all of the elements together in such a way as to make the story extremely compelling, yet he manages to do so without revealing the true source of the protagonist's troubles until the last pages of the book. This is a book that deserves to become a movie. I could see the setting very clearly in my mind's eye; the descriptive prose was very powerful and crystal clear. The private investigators in the story are characters developed well enough that they deserve a book of their own; somehow they're like famous actors playing in a minor movie role: they're capable of much more than they do here.
If the crime fiction genre appeals to you, this is one of the best I've seen.
The Darkest Place: ISBN 0-312-35253-0, St. Martin's Minotaur, hardcover, 310 pages, $23.95
