Vivian Parry likes the dark. A former actress, she now works as the junior theater critic at a major Manhattan magazine. Her nights are spent beyond the lights, in a reserved seat, giving herself over to the shows she loves. By day, she savages them, with words sharper than a knife. Angling for a promotion, she reluctantly agrees to an interview, a conversation that reveals secrets she thought she had long since buried. Then her interviewer disappears and she learns―from his devastated fiancée―that she was the last person to have seen him alive. When the police refuse to investigate, Vivian does what she promised herself she would never do again: she plays a part. Assuming the role of amateur detective, she turns her critical gaze toward an unsanitary private eye, a sketchy internet startup, a threatening financier, fake blood, and one very real corpse. As she nears the final act, she finds that the boundaries between theater and the real world are more tenuous and more dangerous than even she could have believed.
I inhaled Alexis Soloski's debut thriller, Here in the Dark; but, even readers who don't feel a professional kinship with Soloski's main character should be drawn to this moody and erudite mystery ... Soloski...might have played it safe, but, fortunately for us readers she didn't. Instead of writing a coy send-up of a theatrical thriller, she's written a genuinely disturbing suspense tale that explores the theater of cruelty life can sometimes be.
It's a sturdy premise, with echoes of a movie I won't name because it would give away too much. Soloski's plotting is brisk and her writing is hilarious ... Soloski has a good ear for dialogue, with distinctive voices for most of the suspects and pals in Vivian's orbit. The best of the lot is her brash friend Justine, an actor who keeps Vivian supplied with a steady supply of illicit meds.
Soloski crafts a psychological thriller around Vivian Parry ...Somehow the story seems entirely plausible ... Soloski smoothly transfers her masterful journalistic writing to this novel, creating a classic yet entirely modern noir. Fast-paced, funny, sexy, and witty, Here in the Dark is a satisfying read to the very last word.
