Within A Forest Dark
By Michael Virtanen
Lost Pond Press, paperback, $11.95
ISBN: 978-0-9789254-2-0

Jack Kirkland is an insurance claims adjuster. He travels to the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York to investigate a fairly routine death benefit on a $300,000.00 life insurance policy. The beneficiary, the dead man's live-in girlfriend, is an attractive woman and Jack, still getting over his divorce, finds her irresistible. Knowing he shouldn't, he becomes intimate with her. But despite himself, he finds himself wondering if the man's death was as unavoidable as it seems — he was hospitalized with symptoms typical of the mercury poisoning he had been known to suffer a year or so previously, but died a day later of pneumonia, at first undiagnosed when he entered the hospital. Jack is so smitten with the woman that he goes from being an investigator to a lover and then back again. Despite feeling she may have been responsible for her prior lover's death, he is so drawn to her that he keeps going back for more. The investigation jeopardizes his job, and even his life.

This book is a slight one, but the novel is not. The descriptions of the Adirondack area, also known as the North Country, are well-drawn. The descriptions of the characters, however, were, to this reader, downright confusing. Margaret, the woman in question, is seen to be nearly demonic at times, and I could not fathom why Jack keeps going back to her, or alternatively allowing her to come back into his life. Other characters are seen to be equally both black and white. Jack finds himself thinking, time and again, that he sees possibilities in a given situation where, "if you miss the opening then, you miss it altogether," "one of those temporary openings," and again, "one of those fateful openings. Miss this, and miss it altogether." To my mind, he avails himself of such fateful "openings" to his extreme detriment. The writing is at times lovely, but at others disjointed and anything but smooth.

This is a first effort at a novel for this author, and I'd be interested to see what his future books will bring.

Review by GLORIA FEIT

©2008 Lorie Ham. All rights reserved.