The Midnight Road

Within the first few minutes of Piccirilli's 2007 noir novel, its hero, Flynn, an investigator for New York's Child Protective Services, rescues a young girl and her autistic uncle from her homicidally insane mother, who chases them and forces their vehicle onto a frozen Long Island Sound where it promptly sinks. The girl and her uncle are saved, and so is Flynn. He's barely back on his feet, accompanied by the ghost of a bulldog that perished in the crash, when someone starts killing people he knows and/or loves. Donald Corren's perfectly timed rendition of the car chase and watery crash manages to convey a mixture of suspense and dark humor that he maintains throughout this action-packed, more than a little bizarre literary thriller. Piccirilli's fluid imagination provides a large cast of characters%E2%80%94angry, kind, disturbed, placid, young and old%E2%80%94and Corren finds the proper voice for each of them, including the talking ghost dog. A Bantam paperback. (Feb.)