Even Darkness Sings: A Journey to the Saddest Places in the World: From Verdun and Saigon to Hiroshima and Ground Zero

Horrific atrocities prompt reflection and hesitant redemption in this sometimes lugubrious, sometimes luminous memoir in which crime novelist Cook (The Chatham School Affair) recounts his travels with his wife and daughter to bloody and blighted locales. The several dozen destinations include citadels of death, like Auschwitz and the Verdun battlefield, where 300,000 men died during WWI (Cook finds the solemnity there shattered by boisterous teenagers), but also more obscure corners of sorrow: a Japanese temple to the souls of aborted fetuses; a Parisian square that hosted a grisly public execution; the nation of Ghana, sad partly because of a former slave prison but mainly because of ongoing poverty. Cook plumbs the fascinating histories of these sites, leavening them with vibrant present-day travelogue, like an evocative depiction of the Catholic shrine at Lourdes as a study in neon-lit tawdriness beside candle-lit piety (clear Virgin Mary statues were crafted with her in “a blue gown that could be unscrewed, thus turning the sacred effigy into a water container”). Cook doesn’t reach for moral lessons in the awful past; instead they emerge tacitly from signs of life and compassion he discovers in the present. The result is a gripping exploration of how hope sprouts from despair. (Oct.)