Detective Fiction, Hispanic Americans - Fiction & Literature, Occupations - Fiction

Dead of Night

Name: Dead of Night
Author: Alex Abella
ISBN: 9780684814261

by Alex Abella

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Overview

Dead of Night features the return of Charlie Morell, the fierce and impassioned Cuban-American lawyer - and sometime private investigator. Charlie Morell finds himself once again facing a landscape of unrelenting evil cloaked in the mesmerizing rituals of the Afro-Cuban religions santeria and palo mayombe, which summon ancient spiritual powers to the service of its modern-day practitioners. Morell becomes entrapped in the maw of the occult when he promises an old friend of his recently deceased mother that he will search for her missing godson. Morell soon discovers that the godson, Ricardo Diaz, is a priest of palo mayombe who heads a black-magic cult that conducts gruesome ceremonies of torture and human sacrifice. Galvanized by the unspeakable depravities of Diaz and his followers, and by the horrific murder of a close friend, a good-hearted priest of santeria, Morell sets out after his quarry. But Diaz proves to be more elusive and diabolical than anyone imagines, and Morell's pursuit takes him from the mansions and cemeteries of Miami to the scorched hinterlands of Baja California and the seamy barrios of Los Angeles.

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Editorials

Kirkus Reviews

Wildly improbable, out-of-control follow-up to Abella's well-received legal procedural The Killing of the Saints (1991). More a revision of his earlier novel than a sequel, Dead of Night pits Cuban-American lawyer and p.i. Charlie Morell against a gruesomely homicidal Santeria sorcerer, Ricardo Diaz, a meaner, more brutal version of Saints bad guy Ramon Valdez. While Morell is both charmed and dismayed by what he considers the superstitious Afro-Cuban faith of his parents, Diaz is a true believer in palo mayombe, which uses repugnant human sacrifices to achieve evil ends. Diaz's first victim is Armando Ponce, Morell's kindly Santeria mentor. A threatening message, written in Ponce's blood, promises that Morell will be the next to die. Morell, who successfully defended Valdez in the previous book, now goes after Diaz as a favor to the mysterious Mrs. de Palma, the best friend of Morell's recently deceased mother, who believes that Morell can make the wayward sorcerer (her godson) give up his evil ways. It's bad enough that Diaz seems supernaturally powerful—he also has numerous friends in high places, including the estranged daughter of a US senator, a pack of Colombian drug lords, a coven of corrupt L.A. cops, and even a former Mexican president. After a hair-raising escape in the Mexican desert, Morell and a Santeria priestess track Diaz to an abandoned church in the Frogtown section of Los Angeles. Heþs arrested for murder and, in a reversal of the first book,is hired by the L.A. County prosecutor to help convict Diaz. The storm-tossed climax, involving ghosts, AIDS, a gun, and a gravesite, is so over-the-top that it actually works. A dark, bubbling cauldron of gross-outhorror and Cuban-American folklore, stirred by a whiny, but winning, sad-sack hero who can't believe that any of this is happening to him.