Daylight

The Washington Post

In Daylight, Elizabeth Knox has written a Northanger Abbey for the new century, an entertaining fiction that offers a potent summation and critique of a weary genre. Her style is meticulous and dreamlike, moving with a languor worthy of its nightwalkers. She demands and deserves a careful reading, because there is no doubt: Daylight is not just another vampire novel. — Douglas E. Winter

The Boston Globe

It is, rather, a marvel of imagination and plotting, sometimes fascinating, other times baffling: The story moves back and forth in time; events are related in fragments; easy-to-miss details become significant many pages later; settings, characters, and incidents proliferate. However daunting, Knox's method does serve to draw the reader into the story. We are forced to look back continuously, trying, along with the protagonists, to find continuity and logic in a maze of bizarre episodes, including suicide, body snatching, assault, and murder. — Judith Maas

Publishers Weekly

Saint or vampire? The identity of the Blessed Martine Raimondi, a French nun murdered by the Nazis in 1944 for her part in the daring cave escape of rebel partisans, is only one question answered in this illuminating tour-de-force set in the south of France from New Zealander Knox (Billie's Kiss). Another puzzle is Martine Dardo, the suspected daughter of the nun. Brian "Bad" Phelan, a New South Wales bomb tech and expert "caver" on paid injury leave, helps retrieve Martine's blistered corpse outside a cave near the Italian border and discovers she bears a shocking resemblance to a woman he'd encountered years before in another flooded cave. He's further struck by Martine's resemblance to Eve Moskelute, the subject of a painting by Jean Ares, her Picasso-esque deceased husband. The author constructs an impressive mystery that dissects the meaning of miracles while putting a fresh spin on the vampire archetype, with her creation of Lou Ila, an 18th-century Proven al journeyman/artist vampire, on a par with the best Anne Rice has to offer. Bad seeks out Eve, who not only knew Martine but has a "dead" twin, Dawn, accidentally "turned" by Ila when he mistook her for Eve. This multi-layered dazzler also includes the unforgettable Father Daniel Octave, who hopes his investigation into the "miracles" surrounding the Blessed Martine will result in her canonization but instead leads into Ila's dark world and the disturbing discovery that the vampire is "a sign... and so belonged to God." (Apr. 1) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

If Anne Rice, Patrick White, and David Lynch had gotten together (unlikely, but think of the possibilities), they might have had a few drinks and concocted something like this crazily overstuffed fourth novel from the New Zealand author (Billie's Kiss, 2002, etc.). Call it magical realism noir. For mysteries begin proliferating when Australian policeman Brian "Bad" Phelan, recovering on vacation near the French-Italian border from injuries sustained while defusing a bomb, helps retrieve a drowned woman's body from a sea cave-and notices her identical resemblance to a woman he'd met years before, in disturbingly similar circumstances. Things go quickly from bad to worse. The embattled cop seeks information about the dead woman, Martine Dardo, possibly the daughter of Blessed Mother Martine Raimondi, a heroine of WWII's Italian partisans murdered by the Nazis. Even more confusing appearances (magnified by Knox's turgid conflations of past with present) are made by Father Daniel Octave, who's investigating Raimondi's qualifications for sainthood; scholar Eve Moskelutz (whose specialty is the libidinous aristocrat Marquis de Chambord, author of the popular romance Daylight); the widow of noted painter Jean Ares; Eve's twin sister Dawn, a frequently unclad seductress who enjoys biting other people's tongues; the decapitated body of a former beneficiary of one of Mother Martine's "miracles"; and a soulful vampire named Lou Ila, who knows the secrets most of these folks and their acquaintances and lovers have been concealing for years (if not centuries). This bizarre narrative impasto, at times as entertaining as it is certifiably insane, eventually does reach a resolution of sorts, but itdoesn't make a whole lot of sense-not that the battle-fatigued reader really expects it to. Compared with this, Knox's earlier fictional premises (a mortal's love affair with an angel, for example) seem like kitchen-sink realism. What's next? Waltzing Matilda as a punk priestess of Ishtar?