The 8th Circle

November 9, 2015
Newspaper columnist Danny Ryan, the hero of Cain’s intricately plotted first novel, has been unable to work in the year since his wife, Beth, and their preteen son died in a car accident. One stormy night, Michael Cohen, a close friend of Danny’s, drives his car into a shallow pond on Danny’s property outside Philadelphia. Danny rushes outside. The dying Michael, who has a bullet wound in his gut, utters one word before expiring: inferno. What was Michael trying to tell him, Danny wonders, and why was he killed? In pursuit of the answers, Danny takes on crooked police, shady politicians (including Beth’s father, Senator Robert Harlan), and Philly’s foremost philanthropists—all at his own peril. Meanwhile, he comes to question the cause of his wife’s accident and the resolution of the serial killer case he covered that won him a Pulitzer Prize. How Danny discovers the truth and whether it will corrupt him makes for exciting reading. Agent: Renee C. Fountain, Gandolfo Helin Literary Management.

Starred review from November 1, 2015
This dark thriller is a fast-paced plunge into a hell that reeks of sex and blood. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Danny Ryan gets right to the point: "We're all dying, so we might as well get on with it." He finds his friend and colleague Michael Cohen gut-shot and dying in a BMW on his property, and the victim's dying word is "Inferno." Danny's wife, Beth, and son, Conor, had died in an accident almost a year earlier, so the coincidence of so many deaths is not lost on detectives John Novell and Sean McFarland. They suspect Danny may be good for the crime. But clearly someone has it in for Danny, who gets mysterious phone calls demanding he turn over a package he doesn't think he has. And then he finds his poor dog, Beowulf, bludgeoned, dead in a pool of blood. In his car, Danny finds a woman's human heart wrapped in a G-string and later finds the rest of her body in his bed. Inferno, he learns, is an organization that runs sex clubs with a clientele that includes important people having kinky sex. A congressman is burned to death, 22 girls have already been strangled by the Sandman, who is also suspected in the Ticonderoga-pencil killing of Danny's brother, Junior (a No. 2 to the temple). Lots of people meet untimely ends at the hands of delightfully disgusting villains such as Mason, who sees in Danny "beauty wrought by the exquisite hand of suffering." Repetition of William Blake's line "Some are born to endless night" weaves an apt theme throughout. The novel's title, of course, is from Dante's Inferno, where some of the victims are bound for "the eighth circle with the other hypocrites and frauds." This dark debut isn't for everyone, but it's great for what it is: tight, well-crafted, and nasty. It nails the noir.

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December 1, 2015
Still reeling from the death of his wife and son, Pulitzer-winning journalist Danny Ryan has the story of a lifetime fall in his lap when his colleague Michael Cohen dies in his arms, whispering, Inferno. There have been rumors about a social club by that name, which functions as a kind of network for the Philadelphia elite with extreme sexual tastes. As Danny digs deeper, he learns that his cop father may have crossed paths with the Inferno when he cracked a serial-killer case decades ago. He's joined in his investigation by Kate Reid, a secretive aide working for his late wife's father, an ambitious senator who always hated Ryan. Child abuse, serial killers, sex clubs, sadists, and a whole privileged roster of the morally agnostic populate this dark debut. Ryan is a perfect hero; with nothing left to lose, he's incorruptible. One can certainly see the brooding journalist making a compelling series lead.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)