I got this book free for my Kindle (it still is free, at least as of this writing), and I have to say it’s one of the better free books I’ve downloaded. Ryne Douglas Pearson is known as an author of techno-thrillers, but, as he explains in an Author’s Note, before he started in that genre he wrote The Donzerly Light, a Dean Koontzian supernatural thriller, which didn’t sell. He remained fond of it though, and the advent of e-publishing made it possible for him to offer it to the public.

The time is the late 1990s. Jay Grady wakes, tied up and blindfolded, in a dark closet, with a cast on a broken leg. Rough hands lift him up and carry him to an interrogation room, where he is questioned by a man who does not seem to be a policeman. Jay was captured after being seen shooting a man to death. He does not deny the act. Once, we learn, he was a Wall Street celebrity, a young man with a gift for picking winning stocks, a mover on the way up. Then he suffered what looked like a psychotic break, and disappeared. For years he survived as a transient. Now here he is.

Jay hides nothing. His life was altered forever, he says, when he stopped one morning and gave money to a panhandler on Wall Street. The panhandler rewarded him with a “gift,” a form of magic that allowed him to identify rising stocks ahead of the market. The gift might almost have seemed a divine one, except that it led Jay into all the stereotypical excesses and acts of selfishness that so frequently go with being young and rich. Then, when his power changed in a terrifying way, he fled his old life. But he could not avoid a final showdown with the supernatural forces in which he’d dabbled.

I found The Donzerly Light (the title refers to a child’s misunderstanding of the line from the national anthem) an utterly fascinating story, worthy of comparison with Dean Koontz in his middle period, before he started adding explicitly Christian elements to his stories. (I might note that this book treats Christians with respect, and Jay, although he shares a motel room with an attractive woman drawn into his adventure, does not share a bed with her).

Fascinating, moving, with a genuine, page-turning mystery at its bottom, The Donzerly Light is a winner. If you have an e-book reader, I recommend it. Mild cautions for language and adult situations.

“Abner,” replied Dillworth, “how shall we know what justice is unless the law defines it?”

“I think every man knows what it is,” said Abner.

“And shall every man set up a standard of his own,” said Dillworth, “and disregard the standard that the law sets up? That would be the end of justice.”

“It would be the beginning of justice,” said Abner, “if every man followed the standard that God gives him.”

“But, Abner,” replied Dillworth, “is there a court that could administer justice if there were no arbitrary standard and every man followed his own?”

“I think there is such a court,” said Abner.

This passage, from a story entitled, “The Tenth Commandment,” in the book, Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries, by Melville Davisson Post (published 1918), encapsulates, in its moral libertarianism, much of what I found fascinating, and irritating, in this collection. I would like to recommend it for some readers, but have a hard time saying what kind of readers those might be.

“Uncle Abner” is a Virginian backwoodsman living some time in the early 19th Century (I was never able to work out exactly what period. The clues were all over the map.) Most of his stories are narrated by his hero-worshiping nephew (hence the “Uncle”). Abner is a Christian of unimpeachable (frankly overdrawn) integrity and intelligence, a man without official office who nevertheless acts as an investigator whenever a murder is discovered in the neighborhood. His reading of the human heart is infallible, his observations invariably correct, his judgments infallible.

He has little regard for human institutions of justice. When he discovers a murder he’s as likely to let the guilty party off as to turn him over to the authorities, sometimes on the basis of reasoning that seemed pretty obscure to me. He seems to believe that God’s justice is active and inescapable, not only in eternity but in the present, and regards himself as God’s instrument.

In short, he’s a man many of us would like to be, and is also kind of insufferable. In addition I think his theology weak (at one point he says that the devil “is very nearly equal, the Scriptures tell us, to the King of Kings.” The Scriptures tell us no such thing).

The puzzles are interesting, some of them noteworthy in the history of mystery writing. The stories reminded me of Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries, but were less didactic in terms of theology, and the characters less rounded.

I’d like to recommend this book to adults, but I suspect most readers (even Christians) will find them a touch naïve in terms of realism. I’d like to recommend them for children, but the depictions of black people (mostly slaves at that point in time in Virginia) are not the kind I’d like to see children exposed to.

So make your own judgment.