Publisher – Eerie River Publishing

Published – out now

Price – 78p kindle ebook £7.96 paperback

Before ‘The Devil Walks In Blood’ and ‘One Life Left’, Nick Holleran, Haven’s one and only Paranormal Detective, finds himself drawn into a dangerous game destined to change his second life completely.

Treading water after being brought back from the brink of death, and finding his perception of reality altered forever, Nick is simultaneously offered a job and blackmailed into finding the same place: a motel and bar by the name of ‘Whiskey Pete’s’, and a road missing from every known map called Route Thirteen.

Curiosity and notions of self-preservation piqued, Nick travels to the Middle-of-Nowhere, Idaho, and is confronted with the supernatural, the weird, and the horrific in a thrilling prequel story from the Paranormal Detective’s early years, where Nick learns an important lesson.

No one ever leaves Whiskey Pete’s. Not really.

The role of private investigator has easily moved from crime into particularly the urban fantasy realm. The advantage of a detective is they are able to go up and down all the levels of society asking difficult questions which helps to explore particularly modern world settings and a crime helps create a plot point where adding magic can make the case have more unusual dimensions than Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle could ever dream of. In David Green’s novella The Darkness In the Pines we have a novella providing an early look at a long-running series’ main character’s earlier adventures but for me it was not a very satisfactory reading experience

Nick Holleran should have died after falling foul of his small town’s gangsters but the private detective was happily brought back to life thanks to a passer-by and paramedics. However, the near-death experience has reshaped Nick’s life and he now sees all the supernatural entities and ghosts living among us. Nick has realised our world is just another branch of Hell. Four years on he is still adapting to this life and the strange secret world he is now part of when he is required to investigate a missing reporter who vanished in a nearby state. This leads Nick to the eerie motel Whiskey Pete’s where more danger awaits.

There are things I did enjoy about this story. Nick’s narration can often be amusing. He is running his mouth off to us and anyone he meets at 90 miles an hour. The idea that our world is some outer part of Hell is intriguing and Green has created an interesting world where demons, ghosts and angels clearly all exist and have their own agenda. The opening of the story where Nick finds out the dangers of demonic bargains is well-handled and the ending of that scene handled well to remind us Nick’s world is dangerous. This is a prequel tale to a longer series and Green does a good job of explaining the core basics of the world to keep you entertained and keen to see more.

Unfortunately, there is a lot more that doesn’t work for me in this story. A lot of which is explained by the afterward confirming this was originally a short story. It feels incredibly fragmented and has little flow which is something I am really looking for in a novella. The tale feels like it has to constantly remind me of facts that I’ve only read a few pages ago yes, I get that you think we are in hell Nick you’ve told me half a dozen times! For an short novella the pacing is very slow and the story is over halfway before we actually enter near to Whiskey Pete’s (where the Prologue suggests this was a dangerous unforgettable case) and a takes a bit longer again before getting there. At which point things happen and that seems to be it. I think there is supposed to be a thread where Nick starts to learn to use learning knowledge to battle what he faces but it feels more incidental rather than he has much of a cunning plan to fix things. There may be lots of easter eggs for series readers here to enjoy but they’re sailing tight past me as a new reader and instead things just seem to happen with little consequence slowing down the action and I didn’t really feel invested. By the end I was more left feeling quite cold than felt I’d been on a dangerous adventure I’d never forget.

Overall my impression was that this was more for the series’ fans but for new readers it’s not exactly making me want to know more and the story wasn’t really pulling me in. As such this was a disappointing quite disjointed novella and I cannot recommend it.