Electric Noir: Three Thrillers: The Night Market, The Poison Artist, The Dark Room Kindle Edition

First, two caveats: #1: highly sensitive readers should avoid Jonathan Moore’s ELECTRIC NOIR, since it contains brief but hauntingly gruesome images of physical torture. This is not a “cozy” mystery! And, #2: ELECTRIC NOIR is marketed as “three novels,” so I let time go by, reading other things in between each of these three, so as to keep them from becoming blurred in my mind. In the end, though, I learned that Moore calls this work a triptych—in effect, a single novel, with three casts of characters, and three thematically-overlapping subplots. My recommendation, therefore, would be don’t read it as I did, but rather as one long, shifting book.That said, the first two installments of this triptych—“The Poison Artist” and “The Dark Room”— are solid and engaging mysteries that actually merit the overused, often misused, descriptor “noir fiction.” Moore’s narrative is so engaging that I was frequently surprised, when resuming my read, to find that the narrative wasn’t in first person. Though I’m subtracting half a star for those torture images being over the top gratuitous, Moore writes convincingly and demonstrates, in particular, a mastery of pacing.The Poison Artist is an amateur sleuthing tale with a huge twist ending that comes, not as a slap in reader’s face, but rather as a gradually deepening understanding: as the clues pile up, one can’t avoid seeing, with increasing clarity, that there’s only one possible solution. I also found “The Dark Room” engaging and can highly recommend it, also, though (again) only to the desensitized.The third part of this triptych, “The Night Market,” proved a big letdown for me; and I don’t recommend it. For one thing, it switched genres without warning into science fiction, a genre that almost always overtaxes my ability to suspend disbelief. As the police procedural morphed into Blade Runner-esque futurism, it seemed that every new plot twist introduced yet another new high tech fantasy gizmo, and eventually the limits of the possible were lost, and it ultimately felt deus ex machina (I mean that realism was no longer in play, so all bets were off). And, in addition, since all that fantasy hi-tech gear entailed a lot of exposition, the pacing slowed down to a point that SF fans might recognize, or even dote upon, but it shoots the noir atmosphere in the foot, because “getting” noir should only depend on a cynical grasp of human nature.And finally, it turns out that the first part of this triptych, “The Poison Artist” and the third, “The Night Market” follow such closely parallel narrative arcs that they’re fundamentally two different versions of a single story (or story possibility); and, because I preferred the realism of “Poison,” to the fantasy of “Market,” and because “Poison” appears first in the triptych, and thus feels like the “original,” “The Night Market” felt like an afterthought, or even a clone, all of which made this triptych, for me, end with a whimper.I’ve taken off a whole star for that disappointing ending, which give Moore’s triptych a final rating of 3.5—but, I’ve lovingly rounded that up because these stories really are well written, plus they’re all set in my home town, which is always fun. Granted, I was perplexed by Moore’s apparent affection for the relatively colorless Sunset and Richmond Districts; and there were a few times when I couldn’t help but notice that a character who’d just climbed a really steep hill wasn’t even out of breath; and Moore also chose the most public spot in all of Golden Gate Park for his secret message drop…. But, four stars anyway, if only by the skin of Moore’s teeth.

Just didn't care for it