Darby McCormick is back again. The blonde buzzsaw, Boston CSU specialist and doctor of criminal psychology, is trying to rescue a hostage. As expected, she takes down the villain and kills the hostage who is actually the head bad guy. As a beginning, it could hardly be improved, even if the stakeout turns out to be an exercise, the final part of the SWAT exam. But she’s up and running soon after when her colleague Jackson Cooper tells her about a home invasion, a brutal murder and assorted mayhem.
It’s the start of an investigation that will require all her courage and persistence. The murder is even more brutal than she had imagined, but the motive remains a puzzle. The victim is a woman named Amy Hallcox, a stranger in Boston, and her son, who’s apparently unharmed. More than one killer is involved, but there are also signs that they were interrupted at their gruesome task by a second party who wounded one of the killers in the affray. Darby guesses that the wounded man is dead.
The puzzle is deepened by the fact that the Hallcox boy has regained consciousness and insists on speaking only to patrolman Thomas McCormick from the Belham district of Boston. This is her father who was killed many years ago by a lone schizophrenic. Intrigued, McCormick decides to go to the hospital and when she meets John Hallcox she tries to persuade him to talk to her instead. She has almost succeeded but they are interrupted by a man who barges in, introduces himself as a Federal agent who’s come to take the boy into witness protection. Spooked, the boy pulls a gun from his pocket and shoots himself.
In parallel, there is the story of ex-policewoman Jamie Russo, whose husband was tortured to death in another home invasion three years earlier. Her two young sons were also shot, and she too has survived terrible injuries from the affair. One day, walking through a store, she recognises the man who destroyed her family and her life. He looks completely different, and much younger. He doesn’t recognise her either. Finally, she has the chance to deal retribution and she takes it. She follows the man and his partner to the home in Belham. She is the mysterious shooter who tries to save the victims and she also carries away the murderer in the boot of her car.
Thus begins the story, from two entirely different paths that converge to provide a whole that would be truly shocking if true. Chris Mooney weaves the threads together expertly, keeping each narrative separate, and yet you know they must meet at some point where the truth will begin to emerge.
For instance, Darby’s father has a connection with this story, as has his killer who asks to meet her in his prison and tells her a story that leaves her bewildered, but also believing. Jackson Cooper, whom she fancies, is also in a way tied in, as is the Boston FBI and the police department. Then there are a number of mysterious ghosts, who seem to be walking around in Boston again, and who seem to be intimately in the entire deadly chain of events. The pace is terrific, but it’s not just action for its own sake. The story of Jamie Russo emerges slowly, deliberately, but it is the saddest in the entire narrative. It is this kind of fleshing out of all the characters that lifts The Dead Room out of the usual guns and gore spectacle.
The end is high-octane drama, with lots of killing and high speed driving. Fans of Tamil cinema might find familiar the portrait of the avenger that Darby becomes. But the truth is that you want her to kill everyone involved with the maximum damage. Mooney has managed to paint his villains so evil that you feel a painful death is the only atonement for their deeds. In that sense, it is a triumph of the thriller-writer’s art.
— grao@epmltd.com