By
Dan Hagen
In
her new thriller Daemon Seer,
Charleston, IL, author Mary Maddox gets just the kind of running start that I
like, engaging the reader in an intriguing situation on page one.
Lu
Darlington’s boss confronts her with a true-crime book, “Professor of Death,”
having figured out that she was the girl stalked by this serial killer a decade
before. Those are the events of Maddox’s previous thriller, Talion, but she has structured this
sequel as a stand-alone suspense novel, and having Lu’s nightmarish past catch
up with her makes a perfect jumping-on point.
No
longer an impoverished and endangered young girl, Lu now works for a company that
cyber-spies on corporate employees in a shadowy manner, even as she herself is
spied upon by shadowy supernatural forces she thought she’d left behind a
decade before. It’s subtle nod to the predatory nature of the universe in which
Lu lives.
Tempered
by her horrific childhood, Lu has grown up practical and alert, capable of
facing simultaneous threats.
And
like Dick Francis, Maddox is clever enough to weave her protagonist’s
background skills into the plot in useful ways. Learning that her friend Lisa
is being stalked by a psycho cop, Lu is able to wield her cyber-spying as a
counter-measure.
I
was never quite sure, in the first novel, whether the entities that haunt Lu
are supernatural or manifestations of some multiple personality disorder. But now,
it’s pretty clear that these daemons are independent beings. “Daemon” is a term
for semi-divine beings in Greek and Roman mythology. In Lu’s world, involvement
with them puts human beings in a position roughly akin to that of a small
animal dashing back and forth on an interstate highway.
The
beautiful Talion tells her that she must breed for him, subjecting her to pain
and passion to show her he holds the whip hand. But Lu — realizing that the
entity need not have told her his plans at all, but could merely have
manipulated her in to doing what he wants — reasons that he therefore must need
something from her, some kind of assent that she might be able to deny him if
she can deduce what it is.
Behind
Maddox’s narrative, but never impeding it, is a recognizable 21st
century America of economically marginalized people — forced to take lousy,
morally suspect employment, vulnerable to trumped-up charges. Their quiet desperation
is as familiar to them as dried sweat on a Walmart t-shirt, and it’s another
factor that heightens the odds against them in their struggle to survive. The
very tired ordinariness of their world makes its fantastic elements seem more
real.
Adding
zest to the recipe is Maddox’s gift for a lyrical phrase: “Golden light
stretched my shadow across the patchy grass;” “Her fear skittered through my
body and became my fear.”
As
Lu faces threats from adversaries both human and inhuman, both unnerving and
uncanny, Maddox keeps ratcheting up the suspense. When Lu finds herself in a
bidding war between daemons, it turns out that being pursued and trapped by a
sadistic sex killer cop isn’t even the most serious of her troubles…
Both
Maddox’s Lu Darlington supernatural thrillers are available at Amazon.com and
Barnes & Noble Booksellers on line.
Thanks for the kind review, Dan.
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