Dark Road Rising

Dark Road Rising (2009) P.N. Elrod

Jack Flemming is in trouble. He’s put his best friend and partner in the hospital, and the mobsters from New York won’t leave him alone. Even worse, one of the mobsters is actually a vampire, and in a strange twist of fate, Jack is ordered to keep tabs on him until he goes back to New York.

Dark Road Rising immediately follows events in the book Song in the Dark. Which I don’t have. (It’s out of print.) Luckily, having missed those the previous book didn’t have too great of an impact, since the past events were described at least enough to make sense of current events.

The story is quite dark. Jack is getting past an ugly place, and Whitey Kroun, the vampire from New York is a cipher with a very black history. But the Kroun thread was the darker of the two, and we actually see events from his point of view. I quite liked this part of the story, as we slowly discovered who Kroun is, and why everyone is so nervous around him.

I am glad that she put quite a bit of back story in, since we apparently missed quite a lot, and picking up the previous books to pick up the story is not going to happen until they are reissued. On the other hand, if you have no history with Jack and Escott and Bobbi, I’m not sure that you won’t be missing a good deal by starting to story here. We started this series in the middle, and weren’t too enamored with the book where we began. But when we went back and started at the beginning, things made quite a bit more sense.

So if you have read Jack Flemming stories previously, you’ll probably want to pick up this installment. If you have not read any of the series before, I’m not sure this would be the best place to start.
Rating: 7/10

• Browse the archives:
  
• X-23: Innocence Lost » »
• « « The Better Part of Darkness