I won't say anything about the storyline's details because these have been set out by other reviewers. Suffice to say that SoI grabbed me and kept me totally in its thrall all the way to the final heart-squeezing page. It's a knockout read and right in there as a defining surveyor's post of contemporary noir storytelling. Brilliant!

Compared to Little Girl Lost's predictability, SoI has all the intricacy of a Swiss watch - there's layer interwoven with layer and all along there are subtle clues about what is really going on with Dorrie Burke...if only you (and protagonist Blake) could see them in time. Blake's character is fully developed here as a loyal friend who is determined to do what is right for Dorrie - at no matter what personal cost. His angst is real and poignant. He is determined to the right thing for the right reason but, as they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions...

Aleas does a superb job with atmosphere and environmental descriptions. Subsidiary characters were clearly drawn and supercharge his storytelling.

Quite honestly there's nothing I can find to criticize in Song of Innocence...so an easy, and rare for me, 5-stars for a gripping and memorable story with a ripping ending.

Songs of Innocence is the second novel by Richard Aleas, the pen name of Charles Ardai, who is the founder and editor of Hard Case Crime. Ardai has also worked as a writer and producer for the tv show Haven. This book is paired with his earlier work, Little Girl Lost, although it is not necessary to read the first one before diving into this one. They are both great books and I highly recommend both for your reading enjoyment.

What is unique and different about these books in the crime fiction universe is that the protagonist of both books (meaning the main character) is not some tough, cynical, hard-boiled detective who wins nearly every fight, sweet talks every woman he meets, and has a clever quip ready for any occasion. Instead, Ardai chose to center his work around a soft-boiled center. The lead character, John Blake, is a Peter Parker type for those of you familiar with Spiderman. In other words, Blake is the superhero or super-detective's mild-manner alter ego. Blake is someone who looks young for his age. At 21, he looked 16 and, at 24, he looked 18. He appears to be an innocent hayseed from Nebraska or Iowa and isn't tough. It appears that using Blake as the hero of the story was a very conscious choice on the part of Ardai and Blake gives these stories a strong emotional center and moral focus.

In Little Girl Lost, Blake was a college dropout who joined an older retired police officer in a small insignificant detective agency. He chased down demons and ghosts of his past in that one. Songs of Innocence begins three years later. After the events of Little Girl Lost, Blake is disillusioned with the detective business and heartbroken. He returns to college and is a teaching assistant in a writing program. He has one close friend in the writing program: Dorrie. Dorrie is tall and so beautiful that every head turns as she walks by. As Ardai describes her, "she entered a classroom as if there was a curtain at one end and a row of photographers popping flashbulbs at the other. It wasn't something she did deliberately, but she did it nonetheless, and the rest of us all turned and watched as she found her way to an empty chair, . . ." "She was beautiful," he explains, "in a way you're accustomed to seeing on movie posters or the pages of a magazine but not in real life." "[Y]ou couldn't stop looking at her," he said.

John and Dorrie are practically inseparable. John also knows Dorrie's secret: that she moonlights from the writing program doing massages and other "tricks" for Johns. It pay her college tuition.

It is Blake who finds Dorrie's body in her bathtub, plastic bag pulled tight over her head and suicide book nearby. By pre-arrangement, he scours her apartment for things that her mother wouldn't be comfortable knowing about, i.e., all the outfits Dorrie used in her work and her computer. He also notices that her calendar and papers have all been shredded. After accessing her computer, he finds that someone erased all her e-mail. Dorrie's mother doesn't believe it was a suicide although how someone got in the locked apartment does not compute. John also realizes that things don't make sense and recalls that he and Dorrie had a pact that, if they ever had suicidal thoughts, they would call the other first and talk it out.

The investigation takes John into the underworld of massage parlors and Asian bathhouses. It pits him against Hungarian gangsters and chased into dark corners where only rats cold be found. John desperately tries to solve the mystery as a statewide manhunt ensues for him and the newspapers all shout headlines accusing him of vicious murder after vicious murder.

It's a quick read and hard to put down. Along the way, the reader sees innocence stripped from people as they feel forced to react to the events that occur. Although this takes place in the modern world of cell phones and computers, it is every bit as compelling as many classic noir tales. The darkness and despair can be felt throughout this book. I can't remember if the sun ever shined.

Read it.

A bleak and brilliant deconstruction of the classic, hard-boiled detective novel that focuses on the detective's motivation. Compared to other contemporary third person, multi-narrator (and even dog narrator), time-jumping detective novels, the use of first-person narration with a linear plot is powerful and even more impressive for what it accomplishes. The linear plot, use of first person narration, and the implied limitations on knowledge are crucial to the power, meaning, and theme of the book.

There are passages I highlighted and re-read because they were well-written or were very nice turns of phrase. There are passages, two in particular, that I highlighted, re-read, and will continue to re-read because of their devastating psychological insight. Insight that was quite frankly painful, but for that reason all the more significant.

Having said that, one caution. The book is depressing. Bleak. To be honest, in the future I will read all of the reviews of any new book by this author to look for warnings of the same. I will be torn and quite frankly tempted to NOT buy the book if I see such warnings. I'm at the point in my life where I don't need any more depression, bleakness or loss of hope. That is nothing against the author. On the contrary, it is a testament to the power of his writing. Oh, I will probably buy the book anyway because I like the author's writing and more importantly his insight, but you have been warned.