Intense Journey - Detective's career pits her against brutal villains

ABANDONED. By Cody McFadyen. Bantam. 383 pages. $25.

Cody McFadyen's latest book in the Smoky Barrett series will show you a glimpse of goodness, and then grab you by the throat and drag you inexorably through a story that is as intense as any of his previous work. As with his other novels in the series -- all of which have been international best sellers -- McFadyen forces Smoky to deal with the most twisted sociopathic killer imaginable; but this time he drives her so near the breaking point as to rend the very fabric of her sanity. McFadyen's themes push the envelope beyond cut-and-paste crime fiction with thought-provoking examinations of life, love, duty, faith and, of course, psychopathology. The opening pages of Abandoned find Smoky introspecting on the notion of aloneness in the face of even the deepest intimacy as she gazes at her sleeping lover:

I share the private knowledge … of what his flesh feels like against my flesh. The velvet steel of it. I know our unique sounds, our sharing and wanting and crying out, me and only me, and I feel a certain selfish pride about it all. I am, in those moments, a possessor of secret knowledge. A holder of hidden things. … But in the end, nothing changes the truth: He doesn't know, in that dark, what I am thinking in my heart of hearts, and I don't know the same of him. This is the truth. We are all separate islands. … I'm afraid to stare at him for too long. He might feel my gaze and wake up. He's alert that way, because he, like me, knows that death is a real thing. An ever-possible moment. You learn to sleep lightly when you do what we've done, see what we've seen.

Under a starry Hawaiian sky, Smoky considers the ways of the world, and the fact that she has chosen a career that puts her in constant contact with the vilest monsters to hide in human skin:

I spend my life peering into the darkness these people radiate. It's a cold blackness, filled with mewls and skittering things, high-pitched screeching laughter, unmentionable moans. I have killed bad men and been hunted by them too. It is my choice and my life, and I wake up to it, I come home from it, I sleep with my man and wake up to it again. So it's rare that I lift my head and really see the stars. We all live and die under them, but I tend to be most concerned with the dying part. I've had dreams of victims, on their backs, hitching final breaths as they gaze up at those ruthless, forever points of light.

Chapter 2 is primal. It comes at us in square, bold typeface, in contrast with the more tender touch of Smoky's Chapter 1 narrative. It is a flashback glimpse into the foundry of abuse that forges this story's villain from an existence of pain and hopeless brutality until it becomes an automaton concerned with nothing more than ensuring that it will continue to eat, breathe and excrete waste. A conglomeration of parts with human appearance -- but in reality nothing more than a mass of cold, calculating, animated meat.

Chapter 3 transitions back to the softer typeface of Chapter 1, and we're treated to a lighter tone as Smoky and her friends celebrate the wedding of one of their own: beautiful Callie, the irreverent, red-headed forensics and criminology expert whom everyone had always considered a "serial non-monogamist." But by the end of the chapter, Smoky has received a mysterious text message promising a special delivery -- and then a screaming woman is dumped from a car into their midst. The woman, showing signs of malnutrition and dehydration, has obviously been held in darkness and in shackles for years. She is stark, raving mad.

With all this and more in the first 30 pages, you will be locked in and propelled forward through terror, tears and adrenaline as you follow Smoky and her team through a story so believable and so emotionally charged that the only reason you'll be able to find for stopping will be exhaustion from the relentless pace.

Steven Beach is a writer who lives in Lawsonville.