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The Dazzling Darkness
Paula Cappa, author
A secret lies buried beneath the haunting statues of Old Willow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. The nearby woods are alive with the spirits of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott. Does Elias Hatch, the cemetery keeper, know the power hiding in the old graveyard?
On a cold afternoon in March, a neighbor boy, five-year-old Henry Brooke, goes missing. His parents are frantic as hours pass. Then, a police dog tracks Henry's scent inside the nearby cemetery. Detective Mike Balducci suspects that Elias Hatch knows the truth about what happened to the young boy. As shadowy apparitions drift through the trees, Balducci will struggle to unravel the secrets of the dazzled faces in the darkened air in this gripping supernatural thriller.
Reviews
Five-year-old Henry Brooke disappears mysteriously in Cappa’s amateurish paranormal thriller, set in a present day that feels weirdly like the 19th century. Henry’s parents mobilize the entire town of Concord, Mass., in a search for him, and suspicion settles on Elias Hatch, the reclusive keeper of a cemetery that’s always locked. Predictably, Hatch has secrets of his own: the dead in his cemetery are actually quite lively. Worried relatives, dead Transcendentalists, legendary crystal skulls, unnecessary (and clichéd) Vatican investigators, and dubious angelology tangle up in a plot overstuffed with detail. Cappa (Abasteron House) displays evidence of solid research on the Transcendentalists, but her prose is clunky, her characters flat, and her thrills unthrilling. The Concord setting could be almost anywhere. Despite the lack of writerly craft, the sheer quantity of incident does at least mean that the book is never boring. (BookLife)
