The Animals After Midnight
A Darby Holland Crime Novel
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3.1 • 7 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"Elmore Leonard fans should be pleased." —Publishers Weekly
"Darby Holland is a modern hero in the mod of Sam Spade and Marlow only with more tattoos and in steel-toed boots." —Ace Atkins, New York Times-bestselling author of Robert B. Parker's Slow Burn
In this third novel in the Darby Holland Crime Novel series, Darby's past rises up to do more than haunt him. You can run, but in the information age you can only hide for so long. Midnight Rider Productions is a dark web nightmare machine, headed by the one man who years ago drove Darby to hide in the seamy environs of Old Town and make his life there. But Darby left his own mark back in the day and the shadowy head of production has a grudge to settle. Rider has found him at long last and plans to make an example of him. Every dark secret of Darby’s is exposed, every triumph reversed, every dream made real is set on fire, and as the Feds circle, smelling blood in the water, Darby has to run the most brutal rearguard action in the history of crime-meets-crime and gamble that he has finally grown powerful enough, crazy enough, and hard enough to beat the Devil himself. Meanwhile his best friend and should-be lover Delia, is about to be married to someone with his own dark secrets. With the help of his friends new and old, Darby must save Delia and himself and the rest of the Lucky Supreme faithful as he plays one force against another with desperate brilliance in an epic conflict that rages through the dark underbelly of Portland, Oregon.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Darby Holland has a complex backstory, as shown in Johnson's engrossing third novel featuring the Portland, Ore., tattoo parlor and strip club owner (after 2017's A Long Crazy Burn). Early on, for example, the reader learns that Darby once drugged a real estate developer and sent "him off to die in Russia." Now some of that checkered past has resurfaced. Darby returns home one night to find concrete evidence to buttress his suspicion that someone has been stalking him footprints in the dirt outside his bedroom window. The search to identify his stalker turns deadly. Eventually, the trail leads to Midnight Rider Productions, which has been producing episodic documentaries. The company's sadistic business model is to destroy a person's life and film the resulting decline, which in at least one instance ends in suicide. Johnson lightens the heavy subject matter with odd subplots, including Darby's journey into the woods to bury a friend's nephew's dead and frozen pet. Elmore Leonard fans should be pleased.
