Simply because it provided me with a novel reading experience, I need to review David Corbett’s The Mercy of the Night. You may or may not want to read it yourself, but if you do, I think you’ll remember it.

Whether that’s a good thing or not, you’ll have to decide for yourself.

The story, set in a bankrupt, economically distressed small city in northern California, focuses on two troubled souls.

One is Jacqui Garza, a young prostitute, recently escaped from a court-ordered halfway house program. Ten years ago, Jacqui was a celebrity. She had been kidnapped by a sexual predator, but managed to get free. Yet in a sense she never got away at all. Now she’s a witness in a murder, sought by the police and the killers both.

The other is Phelan Tierney, a widower and suspended lawyer working as an investigator. He volunteers as a tutor at the halfway house, and is desperately trying to find Jacqui. Among all the girls he tutored, she showed the greatest promise, but also seemed the most lost. He’s become obsessed with her, to the point where it threatens his relationship with his girlfriend.

Though there are those who wish to harm Jacqui, her greatest enemy is herself, her conviction that she deserves nothing good, and will never get anything good.

The Mercy of the Night is a very well-written book, with excellent characters and dialogue (the climax, I think, was a little rote, but not excessively so). But what struck me most in my reading was that I found the book impossible to enjoy. The miasma of failure and doom that hangs over the gray town is palpable in every line. I was certain as I read that this whole thing could only turn out badly.

In fact (small spoiler here), it didn’t end up quite as badly as I feared. But I’m not sure the author intended the book to be as hard to read as it is, from an emotional point of view. I nearly put it down more than once, out of simple dread. (Your mileage, of course, may vary.)

But it’s a well-constructed and well-realized novel. Cautions for violence, moderately explicit sex scenes, and lots of profanity. There seems to be a theological subtext, but it’s postmodernist.