The Dazzling Darkness

Five-year-old Henry Brooke disappears mysteriously in Cappa’s amateurish paranormal thriller, set in a present day that feels weirdly like the 19th century. Henry’s parents mobilize the entire town of Concord, Mass., in a search for him, and suspicion settles on Elias Hatch, the reclusive keeper of a cemetery that’s always locked. Predictably, Hatch has secrets of his own: the dead in his cemetery are actually quite lively. Worried relatives, dead Transcendentalists, legendary crystal skulls, unnecessary (and clichéd) Vatican investigators, and dubious angelology tangle up in a plot overstuffed with detail. Cappa (Abasteron House) displays evidence of solid research on the Transcendentalists, but her prose is clunky, her characters flat, and her thrills unthrilling. The Concord setting could be almost anywhere. Despite the lack of writerly craft, the sheer quantity of incident does at least mean that the book is never boring. (BookLife)