The Animals After Midnight: A Darby Holland Crime Novel

Darby Holland has a complex backstory, as shown in Johnson’s engrossing third novel featuring the Portland, Ore., tattoo parlor and strip club owner (after 2017’s A Long Crazy Burn). Early on, for example, the reader learns that Darby once drugged a real estate developer and sent “him off to die in Russia.” Now some of that checkered past has resurfaced. Darby returns home one night to find concrete evidence to buttress his suspicion that someone has been stalking him—footprints in the dirt outside his bedroom window. The search to identify his stalker turns deadly. Eventually, the trail leads to Midnight Rider Productions, which has been producing episodic documentaries. The company’s sadistic business model is to destroy a person’s life and film the resulting decline, which in at least one instance ends in suicide. Johnson lightens the heavy subject matter with odd subplots, including Darby’s journey into the woods to bury a friend’s nephew’s dead and frozen pet. Elmore Leonard fans should be pleased. (Feb.)