For those readers like me who are counting down the minutes to Ian Rankin’s next novel starring Rebus, we may have found a writer who can satiate that desire. I confess that Alex Gray and his series with DCI Lorimer were previously unknown to me, but I was lucky to have found them, and now have a handful of titles from previous readings to add to my pile of pending books.
Set in Scotland and shifting between the present and twenty years earlier, KEEP THE MIDNIGHT OUT features two murders, decades apart, that bear such similarities as to make the investigator who experienced both murders tremble in a moment of deadly deja vu. DCI Lorimer is on vacation. Unfortunately for him, his brief respite from the Isle of Mull turns out to be anything but a relaxing vacation. The body of a young boy is found floating in a lake near where a father and his son were trying to enjoy a day of fishing.
The Scottish town where this happened was not very large and news of the murder quickly reached Lorimer. He was particularly alarmed because the murdered boy had red hair and was tied up before being thrown into the lake. Immediately, the investigation yields evidence that the young man had been tortured. Whether or not this was done cruelly and with the intention of inflicting great pain or was part of some bizarre sadomasochistic ritual was something that required further investigation.
The detective assigned to the case is Stevie Crozier. Initially, she was not at all pleased to share any part of the case with DCI Lorimer and it will take her some time to recognize that Lorimer’s knowledge of the case twenty years earlier was vital in resolving this present. Lorimer realizes that not only was the victim similar to the one she investigated twenty years earlier, but she was directly denouncing the fact that the same killer is behind both crimes.
Lorimer and Crozier also know that this indicates that the killer is not a young man. He also pointed to the fact that the killer may have had access to or possessed some type of boat. The novel goes back in time twenty years earlier to depict a much less experienced and younger version of Lorimer as he works a murder case. There are also passages that come directly from the killer’s mind and are quite chilling. The killer was definitely targeting young men who appeared to be homosexual and put his victims through extreme pain and suffering before he finally killed them.
The killer currently considers confessing but chooses to remain hidden, especially when the father of the latest victim seemed to be the main suspect because he did not recognize his son’s propensity for men and came out as homosexual. Our killer was happy to sneak back into the dark, waiting to see if Lorimer and Crozier could put the pieces of the puzzle together and turn their attention to him. When they finally find someone who witnessed the same man with both the current and 1995 victims, this is the case break they’ve been waiting for. Now, it would only take a little more digging to find the killer, not realizing that the killer was close by and might very well strike first.
The novel takes its title from the final line of the story when DCI Lorimer thinks to himself, “could his spirit rise above it all and take flight, seeing only the brightness of day to stave off midnight?” KEEP THE MIDNIGHT OUT is well written, atmospheric and often haunting. Alex Gray is definitely an author I’ll be looking to again to appease my dose of Ian Rankin for some fantastic Scotland-based crime thrillers!
