The Midnight Room by Ed Gorman (dark suspense)

Detective Steve Scanlon's life is out of control. Married with kids, he also has an expensive mistress — or thinks he does. Actually, ever since Nicole found out he was married, she'd rather he left her alone, that he's stop buying her expensive gifts in a desperate attempt to re-win her affections.

Steve doesn't give up easily, but he needs more money. He's been neglecting his family, his wife and kids, his brother Michael (also a cop), and their father in the nursing home, leaving Michael to continually make up stories to cover for him more than Michael wants or their father believes.

But Steve had a solution to all his problems. He originally meant only to rob Dr. Peter Olson, but now he knows what the doctor has been up to: kidnapping local girls and torturing them to death in his basement dungeon. Steve found in Olson's safe the DVDs the doctor made of his last two captives, and Olson will pay to keep them secret. It is therefore in Scanlon's best interest that Dr. Olson is not discovered for his latest victim — a recently missing girl named Cindy Baines.

The police have stepped up the investigation since the last victim's skull arrived in her mother's mailbox. Luckily, Scanlon is the investigating officer on the case along with his partner, Kim Edwards — who, not coincidentally, Dr. Olson has just begun dating. And that's just the beginning of author Ed Gorman's The Midnight Room, a dark ride that isn't even over when the main story has played out. There's more to come, and it's even more shocking.

Ed Gorman is one of the great dark suspense novelists working today, and The Midnight Room is his best work yet. Its pieces are assembled bit by bit, and it takes a while for the reader to figure out what exactly is going on. (The strangely misleading blurb on the back cover — which seems to be advertising the book as a horror novel — goes a long way toward clouding the waters.) But Gorman always plays fair and is only keeping back some information for greater effect in later pages.

The Midnight Room is a wholly modern novel, but its roots lie in the Gold Medal novels of the 1950s and '60s. Gorman's influences are right there on the page. His skill at plotting is highly reminiscent of John D. MacDonald's standalone (that is, non–Travis McGee) novels. But his deft control of a multitude of major characters shows the marked influence of John Farris, particularly the author's intriguingly complex Harrison High. (Though Farris also wrote a handful of Gold Medals himself under the name Steve Brackeen.)

Gorman himself has called The Midnight Room his own "Gold Medal novel" and dedicates it to four "old friends who were masters of the form": Peter Rabe, Stephen Marlowe, William Campbell Gault, and Robert Colby. I think they would be proud to be connected to this book. It is the culmination of a life-long love of hardboiled crime novels and is a worthy addition to their ranks.

Baby Moll by John Farris (writing as Steve Brackeen) (Hard Case Crime)

In the 1982 reprint of his modern classic Harrison High, author John Farris mentions in passing some "other novels" he wrote during the time it took him to write that book: "suspense thrillers ... published by Gold Medal Books under a pen name."

Baby Moll was the second of five novels that first saw print under the moniker Steve Brackeen, and Hard Case Crime is publishing it under Farris's own name for the first time. Farris also admits that, at the time of their first publication, he "fondly imagined [they] rivaled the best of John D. MacDonald."

Baby Moll is the story of Pete Mallory, who used to work for gangster Macy Barr, until he got tired of Barr (and his "whole rotten business") and walked out. Pete then settled down with a nice girl named Elaine and spent six years trying to forget his past.

The trouble comes, though, when others don't forget your past, and Barr uses Pete's most closeted skeleton to get him to come back and protect Barr from veiled death threats. But no sooner is Pete back in town than it seems he's also on somebody's hit list, so he's then on the hunt for two potential killers.

If "the best of John D. MacDonald" includes one of my favorites, Cry Hard, Cry Fast, then the young Farris comes very close, at least in terms of characterization. In general its embarrassing to realize what a skilled and confident proseslinger he was right out of high school. Because, to read Baby Moll, you'd never know that Farris wasn't a world-weary 50-year-old spilling his disappointment on the page — that he still had his whole career ahead of him.

Baby Moll offers up a rogues gallery of characters, dark underworld types and otherwise. Its not very predictable nature — along with its fairly atypical, original style — makes for an engaging read, and Farris offers an ending that is both touching and satisfying.