Book Review of The
Black Song Inside
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Blurb:
Atticus Wynn and Rosemary Sanchez, newly
engaged private investigators, have seen the dark and violent side of life.
Nothing, though, has prepared them for an explosive murder investigation that
threatens to tear their relationship apart as they struggle to solve a case
that could leave them in prison or dead.
Atticus’s manipulative ex-girlfriend bursts back into their lives
wielding a secret about Rosemary’s family that she exploits to force the couple
into investigating the execution-style slaying of her lover. The case thrusts
Atticus and Rosemary headlong into the world of human trafficking and drug
smuggling, while rendering them pawns in Tijuana Cartel captain Armando
Villanueva’s bloody bid to take over the cartel.
The Black Song Inside is a vivid crime
thriller rife with murder and madness, melded with gallows humor and the
heroism of two flawed and compelling protagonists who, if they can save
themselves, may learn the nature of redemption and the ability to forgive.
Author Information:
Carlyle Clark was raised
in Poway, a city just north of San Diego, but is now a proud Chicagolander
working in the field of Corporate Security and writing crime and fantasy
fiction. He has flailed ineffectually at performing the writer's requisite
myriad of random jobs: pizza deliverer, curb address painter, sweatshop
laborer, day laborer, night laborer, security guard, campus police, Gallup
pollster, medical courier, vehicle procurer, and
signature-for-petitions-getter.
He is a
married man with two cats and a dog. He is also a martial arts enthusiast and a
CrossFit endurer who enjoys fishing, sports, movies, TV series with continuing
storylines, and of course, reading. Most inconsequentially, he holds the
unrecognized distinction of being one of the few people in the world who have been
paid to watch concrete dry in the dark. Tragically, that is a true statement.
ONLINE LINKS:
·
Website: Forthcoming
·
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Carlyle_Clark
BUY NOW LINK:
·
B&N http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-black-song-inside-carlyle-clark/1116598777?ean=9781477849163
Excerpt:
PROLOGUE
BARTOLO AGUILAR SQUATTED beside a
rutted dirt road in the Anza-Borrego Desert, two hours east of San Diego, and
savored the emotional and spiritual insanity of the woman who was watching the
dying girl spasming in the sand, gurgling and frothing, her bloodshot eyes
rolled up in her head so that they looked like a pair of crimson moons.
Bartolo favored
dawn in the desert for these birthings. Dusk would work, but there was nothing
like the biting crispness of daybreak, the dark sky marbled with orange light,
the desert awash in the smoldering winds sweeping off the mountains--like
amniotic fluid, bathing all three of them in the warm righteousness of the
womb: the unknowing convert, the sacrifice, and of course himself, the man of
God.
That this dying
birthing had been not the result of careful choice on his part, but rather a
fortuitous order from his current employer, Armando Villanueva, made it no less
sacred. The Tijuana Cartel captain hadn’t ordered the birthing nor was he aware
of Bartolo’s faith; Villanueva just wanted a problem to disappear. He would be
furious to discover Bartolo, on divine impulse alone, had brought the woman to
witness. Villanueva didn’t understand that the will of the Lord came before
worldly duties.
Bartolo had founded
his own religion according to three words on an aged and scorched parchment he
had carried every day since discovering it squirreled away in an ancient hut
next to a jungle-shrouded temple, just before he and his comrades roped the
shack’s occupant, a wizened shaman, to his cot and set the hut ablaze. Now,
decades later, Bartolo Aguilar was the sole surviving member and self-anointed
High Priest of the Church of the Aloned, and it was baptism time.
The dying girl was
nothing as a person but everything as a sacrifice, a vessel whose perfect
suffering could draw into the light that which hunkered in the shadows of the
woman’s soul, of everyone’s soul. The girl wasn’t even worthy of being a floor
scrubber in his congregation. She was just another throwaway who’d fooled
herself into thinking that a high school dropout, who couldn’t even handle the
pressures of the fast-food industry, could earn the respect of drug cartels by
allowing herself to be exploited in perhaps the world’s highest-risk,
lowest-reward job: drug mule “swallower”.
Her belly held
twenty condoms filled with highest-grade heroin. Had she made it to the drop,
they’d have given her laxatives and waited until she shit out fifty thousand
dollars worth of product, and then paid her only five hundred. But one of those
condoms had ruptured. Maybe her stomach acid had eaten through it. Maybe the
guy who filled the condoms had been tripping on his own product and fucked up.
Didn’t matter. Not to Bartolo. Not to the guy who loaded the condoms. Not to
the man who ran the whole thing. Not even to the girl--now.
So the girl didn’t
count. Was she Aloned? Certainly, but she had started near the bottom. Died at
the bottom. A little tumble like that didn’t warrant membership. To sit in the
pews in the Church of the Aloned, you must have tasted the dizzying heights of
the exalted, been respected and admired, yet have cast it all away for the
basest of reasons, which were, as far as Bartolo was concerned, the hidden
truths of everything. Hidden that is, until Bartolo came striding into your
life, clutched the nape of your neck, and forced you to stare long and deep
into the mirror to see what you could do. Would do. Will do. Are doing. Have
done.
The woman was in
that most precarious of moments. She was doing nothing to help the girl. That
the girl couldn’t be helped was both the least and most critical element.
“She’s dying,” the
woman said again, her hands tucked under her armpits as if she were cold
despite the ninety-degree desert morning, her feet shifting as if she had to
urinate.
“A cock-sized hit
of heroin will do that to you,” he said, his voice quiet but ragged, like the
sound of saw cutting bone behind a closed door. He stood up, wiped his wet and
grimy face with a black-and-white checkered bandanna, and adjusted his
sweat-darkened cowboy hat.
“I only came with
you because you said there was a way to help her. So what do we do? Why not
take her to a hospital. We have to do something.”
“She’s got enough
pure H in her now to kill a fucking rhino. There’s a drug you could give her
that might counteract that, but I don’t have any. There’s nothing to do but
wait until she dies, and then we cut the rest of the product out of her belly.”
“You don’t know
that. You’re not a doctor.”
“You can always
call 911.” He stepped back and leaned against his white pickup, thick arms
crossed over his barrel chest, the old truck creaking with his added bulk.
“Like you’d let
me.”
“Sure, I would. I
wouldn’t stick around after, of course. You might as well, though. You use your
cell phone, and they’ll know you were here anyway. When someone dies during the
commission of a felony--your felony--that’s first-degree murder. You ready to
ride the needle when it wasn’t even your fault? For a girl who’s going to die
anyway?” He let that sit out there for a while.
It’d be easy to
reel the woman in later. Give her a few news stories about mules who had
survived. Hell, maybe it would be easier than that. The girl might survive the
overdose, only to die of dehydration alone in the desert. If the woman saw that
story, he would fucking own her. Perhaps she would be his first acolyte. It was
time to branch out anyway. Why not start with a pretty woman like this one was?
On the outside, anyway. Ugly inside now. A perfect match. The things they could
do together. But first they needed to cherish this moment. Worship the girl’s
birthing.
“Bullshit. You’d
never let me call 911,” the woman said. “You’d be afraid that I’d . . .” She
balled her fists and finally looked him in the eye. “That I’d tell them about
you.”
He shook his head
slowly, grinning when she looked away--probably unable to bear seeing her twin,
miniature, distorted selves in his mirrored sunglasses. “I got ten guys,” he
said, “All solid citizens, who’ll swear I was chasing tail with them down in
Mexicali.”
“You still
wouldn’t take the chance.”
“Bigger chance
they’d do something to you. For a nothing like the girl, as long as it looks
like what it is, they’ll sleepwalk through the motions, then head to the bar
early for beers and baseball. That’s why we’re going to wait awhile after she
dies to cut her open. So there’s no doubt it was the drug that killed her. But,
for someone like you, they’ll break out all the CSI forensics shit to find you.
Maybe try to make it go federal. Not worth the risk. Don’t pretend like you
haven’t thought of that.”
She flinched. “Wha
. . .what do you mean?”
“You see the girl
is suffering; you know we aren’t going to do anything.” He patted the pistol in
his waistband. “And you haven’t asked about this, because you know the
difference. Now we can walk away from it, and only we know that we were ever
here. If we put her out of her misery, that’s not manslaughter. It’s murder. No
statute of limitations. The rest of your life waiting for the knock on the
door. Let’s get it flopping around on the table. She’s going to die, and we
ain’t gonna do shit about it.”
“You fuck! You
fuck! You fuck! You lied when you told me there was something I could do for
her just to get me out here, you twisted freak.”
“No, you’re doing
something for her right now.” The priest’s voice deepened and thrummed as
though he spoke in synchronicity with something dark and unseen; his westward
gaze seemed to stretch beyond her, chasing the darkness around the rim of the
world as it fled the rising sun. “You are bearing witness to her end. You are
grieving for the loss of her. Is that not doing something for her? Would it be
better to let her die out here alone and unmourned with no one to remember?
Now, she will be remembered, won’t she? That is something I have given unto you
for her. She will be as much in your thoughts as any child from your womb. She
will have a mother who wakes screaming with the vision of her lost child still
floating before her eyes in the darkness. What better homage to a dead child
than a mother’s endless grief?”
The woman gaped at
him. “What are you?”
The priest shook
his head, his gaze returning to normal, his voice again seeming harsh and
whispery and human. “Look, this is just one shit day. You put it behind you.
You make up for it by doing good. What good can you do rotting in prison? What
good will going to prison do for all the people who look up to you? Trying to
do what would make you feel better would just be selfish on your part. You need
to look at the bigger picture here. You’ve got to suck it up and do the hard
thing.”
Bartolo stopped,
luxuriating in the words he would say next, which even now seemed almost like a
caress in his throat. A revelation. He now knew who should be his acolytes. Who
knew the greatest height of human purpose? Mothers. How easily that purpose
could be diverted? Perverted? Bent to the will of the Church of the Aloned?
That had to be why the Lord had inspired him to bring the woman, so he would
come to just that epiphany. Mothers would be the foundation of his church.
His body alive
with zeal, words rolled out--not from him, but from the one true God using him
as He should use his prophet--fashioning a lifeline that was a noose around the
neck of her old self. “So the question is,” he said, “are you going to throw
away a whole life and reputation, and all the goodwill you’ve built up, just so
you can feel better? Think of your children.”
The woman
collapsed into the sand, sobbing.
How he loved these
rare moments when God spoke through him and blessed his desire to step free of
the roles society forced him into--to speak the stark truth and watch the
comprehension of it rip away the flimsy masks of humanity that society demands
people wear.
In these
quickening moments, when the convert was accepting the baptism, washing her old
self away with the burning tears of the Aloned, he thought of the truth he’d
first learned from the old map he’d carried next to his heart as a child
soldier for the FARC rebels in the jungles of Colombia. The very same map he
carried now.
After a day of
dog-trotting through the jungle, or machine-gunning villagers, or dismembering
refugees, or beating a man unconscious only to wake him up with a pail of fetid
swamp water and start over, or being forced to hold girls down while older boys
grunted and thrust atop them, he would sneak away with his penlight--careful to
keep his tears, blood, and sweat off the yellowed and wrinkled parchment--and
study the ancient map.
Those sessions,
hunched in darkness, swarmed by mosquitoes and the cries of the damning and the
damned, were when he founded the Church of the Aloned with the certainty that,
like the prophets of old, the suffering he’d felt and inflicted had revealed to
him searing truths of human instinct that were his burden and privilege to
share.
The exquisite
nautical and geographical details the long-dead cartographer had so
painstakingly sketched held no appeal for him. What riveted him was what the
man had scrawled on the other side of the line that marked the end of the known
world: Beyond Here Be Monsters.
It was the child
soldier Bartolo Aguilar, alone, his body wracked with sickness and exhaustion,
his physical and spiritual suffering forging him into something new to the
world, who realized the ancient cartographer had inserted an extra word that
rendered the whole phrase backward.
Now, immersed in
the languid heat of the coming day, ensorcelled by the brilliance of the
orange-fingered dawn spreading across the lightening sky, Bartolo looked first
at the dying girl, then the weeping woman, and finally, nodding, studied
himself in the side mirror of his pickup, his face a blank shadow, his head
haloed by the rising sun. Not Beyond Here
Be Monsters, but simply Here Be
Monsters.
Review:
I
read this book in the dark, at night, by myself… DON’T do that unless you like
nightmares. I say that not because this
is a horror story, but rather because it is snatched from the headlines of what
is and what could be. PI Atticus Wynn
and his partner and fiancé, former war hero, Rosemary Sanchez find themselves
in an all out war with the drug cartel.
That in and off itself is a bad thing, but add her gang-banger brother,
a black-mailing ex-girlfriend, and possible corruption and anything can happen.
I
give this book 4 out of 5 clouds.
This
product or book may have been distributed for review; this in no way affects my
opinions or reviews.
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