Day 357: The Dying of the Light

This is going to be a fairly short review, because The Dying of the Light was a book I could not finish. I usually enjoy reading Michael Dibdin’s mysteries and I also like dark tales with a macabre sense of humor, but if that is what this is, it is too much.

Rosemary Travis and Dorothy Davenport are two little old ladies who live in a horrible nursing home run by William Anderson and his sister Letitia Davis. The owners are blatantly torturing the residents.

Rosemary and Dorothy react to this environment by turning it into a game, pretending it is some kind of convoluted mystery plot. When Hilary Bryant dies or George Channing is mauled by Anderson’s Doberman when he tries to escape, they fold this into their plot. But when Dorothy dies the night before her departure from the home, Rosemary finds she has a real mystery to solve.

This plot sounds as if it could be darkly humorous, but it is too sickening for me. One reviewer on Amazon says that Dibdin relies on the shock value, and not much else, to carry the novel. That about says it for me, and it doesn’t work.