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Peter Mergendahl - Rocky Mountain News
Hall has done a noteworthy job of describing the Great Smoky
Mountains, Cherokee lore and the vanishing summer camps where
generations of children studied that lore. By turns thrilling and
downright frightening, Forests of the Night is a multilayered,
richly characterized and compulsively readable story. Sam Harrison - The Miami Herald In Forests of the Night, Hall again exhibits mastery of the
craft. He knows, perhaps better than anyone in the genre, how to tap
into the fundamental passions that drive us; ancient, dark, mythic
passions, like those spoken round a fire at the dawn of
story-telling. Blood ties, greed and revenge, mesh with depravity,
obsession and cinema verité on a time-tested narrative skeleton to
form a seamless rush of emotion. Once again, Hall has given us a
thriller of the first magnitude. Reynolds Price, author of Kate Vaiden FORESTS OF THE NIGHT moves like an arrow--lean and swift--toward its amazing target. James W. Hall is at the top of his form; he's a wonder to watch. Russell Banks, author of The Darling A suspenseful, sharply detailed blend of history, family drama, and thriller, Forests of the Night cuts a wide literary swath, and does it with elan and passion.
Publishers Weekly ... fast-paced, entertaining thriller....compelling, with action scenes that bristle with visceral intensity. Nearly everyone has real depth, and the author's appreciation for history and its reverberations adds further complexity.
Of all the great Florida mystery writers, none has the consistent literary heft of James W. Hall, who has produced more than a dozen superb examples of the crime novel as fine art. It is common to compare every Florida mystery writer with the great John D. MacDonald - a comparison that too often denigrates the excellence of the old master. Elmore Leonard deserves to be mentioned in the same breath, though most of his books are set elsewhere. So, too, on rare occasion does Charles Willeford, though many of his paperback novels are either too pulpy or too outre to be taken seriously. Carl Hiaasen is funnier than any of them, and so is Dave Barry, but most of these novels have plots so light that, if they were food, would make a church wafer feel like a Krispy Kreme buffet. When I received Mr. Hall's new novel, "Forests of the Night" (St. Martins, $24.95, 341 pages), I was disappointed that it was not about his series protagonist, Thorn. A good man, brave and true, if a little cranky (okay, extremely cranky), Thorn is one of today's most noteworthy examples of crime-fighting heroes - though he would be the last to describe himself that way. The author has acknowledged that Thorn closely resembles John D.'s most famous creation, Travis McGee, which is a good thing. I mean, it's good that he both realizes it and admits it, and good that he has used such a high-water mark in the history of mystery fiction as his model. But it is homage, not theft, since Thorn is unique and has many characteristics of his creator. Ross Macdonald once said of his private eye, "I'm not Archer, but Archer is me." It seems likely that Mr. Hall would say the same of Thorn. Having had the pleasure of reading this stunning new novel, however, I see I was wrong to regret the absence of Thorn. One of the negatives of reading series novels is that one can be pretty sure that, no matter how dire the situation, it is reasonable to assume that the hero will emerge - perhaps bloody, perhaps defeated, but alive and ready, in the next book, to swing into action. In the stand-alone novel we can never be sure of who will survive and who is doomed, and that lack of certainty adds suspense. "Forests of the Night" (with a title inspired by one of England's greatest poets, William Blake) has its origins in a true historical event. In the 1830s, Cherokee Indians were rounded up and moved from their mountain homes to the arid plains of Oklahoma. Those who resisted were killed. One of those who died was a simple man named Tsali (pronounced Solly) who, when his wife was injured by an ignorant white soldier, retaliated, not unreasonably, by putting his sharpened ax into the soldier's skull. Tsali was given a choice: He could continue to hide, or he could turn himself in to be executed by a firing squad, in exchange for which all the Cherokee in the region would be allowed to stay in their homes. Tsali surrendered, and hundreds stayed in the mountains of North Carolina, where their descendants still live. Mr. Hall uses this act of courage as a metaphor for the responses of others in today's dangerous world - simple, ordinary people who respond with similar selflessness and bravery when confronted with evil. Charlotte Monroe is a policewoman who it would be a pleasure to meet again. She has a rare gift of being able to tell, almost infallibly, when someone is telling a lie. This is so useful in a law enforcement officer that the FBI desperately tries to recruit her. Regrettably, Monroe is married to an extremely effective defense lawyer, who is able to free most of his clients - a source of frustration for her colleagues. Their daughter, Gracey, has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, a source of frustration for just about everybody. One evening, Charlotte comes home from work to find her husband and daughter talking with a young, mysterious Cherokee who happens to be no. 8 on the FBI's Most Wanted List. She calls it in, a SWAT team is deployed, but Gracey helps him escape. Thomas Dark Cloud Panther is wanted for blowing up five banks and killing eight people, and by all appearances has some very bad intentions for the Monroe family. When ominous notes are written in Cherokee, and a blowgun is used in one murder and an ax in another, all clues point to the suspicious young man. This being a mystery novel - one written by one of the masters of the form - all is not as it seems. There is darkness and violence ahead. And if you read mysteries to try to figure it out before the author wants you to, forget it. You won't. If you read mysteries because you believe, as I do, that the best ones are distinguished literature, this is the book for you. There is so much fast paced action and heart-pumping suspense in "Forests of the Night" that, even if you spent so much time under a hot sun that you have turned lobster red, as the novel races to its breathtaking conclusion, you will have white knuckles.
The Denver Post Five hundred years ago Aztec priests slit open the chests of their victims and showed them their still beating hearts in the instant before they passed into eternity. In his opening chapters and prologues, James W. Hall does very much the same thing for his readers. In most of his dozen books, an innocent is suddenly struck down by a cold-blooded killer who shows absolutely no human emotion, instilling in the reader a blood lust to see the murderer punished. If "Forests of the Night" departs somewhat from that pattern, it is only in that the victims are Cherokees, the killers are U.S. troops, and the initial killings take place a century and a half in the past. The fact that the incident is based on an actual historical event makes it all the more chilling. How - and, more important, why - that incident brings a present-day female Coral Gables cop with extrasensory abilities, her criminal defense attorney husband and their schizophrenic daughter to an isolated camp in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina is deftly handled by a writer who carefully measures out the answers in clean yet elegant prose. Hall used to be a poet. In all the important ways, he still is.
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