The prose is eminently readable and intelligent. The main character, I don't care about (not an insuperable barrier, but...); the setting doesn't really come alive; the plot drivers (heavy-metal white supremacist neo-paganism?), I don't buy, at least not drivers of all that happens here.

Hand, it seems to me, is best when dealing with simpler things--the relationship between a strong-willed sister and her fuck-up brother, for instance. All of these bogeymen are clutter. ( )

The story didn't quite grab me to be honest but I find Cass to be such an engaging main character and it was my interest in her that kept me turning the pages. ( )

http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2022-04.html#hand ( )

I can't remember what I input, but whichbook.net suggested I would enjoy this. Since I am a fan of Scandinavian crime novels, and the intersection of Scandinavian metal with galdr is of great interest to me, I bought a copy. I was immediately captivated, and although much was quite implausible and the ending outrageously over-the-top, I loved it! I am so curious now as to how/why the author came to focus on this particular topic, and whether my suspicions about who a certain character was based on are correct, that I am off to look for any interviews or FAQ pages. ( )

This is the second of a trilogy, preceded by Generation Loss and followed by Hard Light. I’ve not read the first – the paperback is already out of print in the UK. Available Dark does refer to the events of Generation Loss, but it’s not necessary to have read it. Briefly, in the first book cult photographer Cassie Neary was involved in the murder of another photographer, close enough that she’d be behind bars if her true role were known. At least, that’s how Available Dark presents the events of Generation Loss. Neary has been in an artistic slump for years and is best known for a single book published years earlier. Neary specialises in photographs of dead people – the story throws around names like Joel-Peter Witkin and WeeGee – and it’s because of that she’s offered a job by a shady Norwegian character. He wants her to go to Helsinki to view a series of six photos by a famous Finnish fashion photographer. The Finnish photographer was once also into death photography, and the series depicts victims in bizarre murders. Coincidentally, Neary has received a mysterious message from a past lover she had thought long dead. And he’s in Reykjavík. After telling the Norwegian the photos are worth buying, Neary heads to Iceland to track down her old boyfriend. Then the Finnish photographer and his assistant are brutally murdered, and it’s all to do with the Jólasveinar, or Yule Lads, grim Icelandic troll-like figures who were used to scare children, Nordic black metal in the 1990s, the member of one of those bands called Galdur who now lives out in the Icelandic wilderness, his band’s only, and incredibly rare, album, and events in Oslo back in the 1990s at the aforementioned Norwegian’s metal club. And, of course, the series of six photographs. An ignorant puff on the back of the book confuses black metal and death metal – they’re different genres – but Hand has a good, er, handle on the music. Neary, however, is a little too good to be true, a little too much of the sort of unkillable drug addict hard case you’d find in an urban fantasy rather than a realistic crime novel. The Reykjavík of 2012 also apparently bears little resemblance to the Reykjavík I visited in 2016, or even in 2018 (though, to be fair, I saw a number of changes between my two visits). Available Dark started out well enough, a slightly off-kilter thriller about death photography and Norwegian black metal, but the character of Neary sort of ruined it. She was too good to be true, too tough to be realistic. And it all hung on a series of murders from the 1990s that seemed unlikely to have gone undetected. I’ve always preferred novels about female detectives to those about male ones, but Available Dark, while structured like a crime novel, felt more like an urban fantasy. ( )