Blog Tour Review - Crone by Keith Rosson

 Blog Tour Review - Crone by Keith Rosson

Eli Lamp is a broken man. An ex-detective, ex-addict, and long-grieving father whose daughter, Hannah, disappeared a decade before, Eli decimated his old life investigating her abduction and is now indebted to the Crooked Wheel, a local drug gang, as an enforcer. He lives in a rundown trailer at the edge of the woods, where he keeps Hannah’s room in pristine condition and tries to make it through one day at a time.

But when the son of the Crooked Wheel’s boss is found viciously murdered in a crime scene that doesn’t seem to add up, Eli receives a new order: Find out who the killer is and your debt to the Wheel is clear forever. You’re free. This pursuit brings him into the orbit of Avery Bryant, Hannah’s best friend and the last person to see her before she went missing. Soon, Eli and Avery are entwined in a hunt for answers that spans decades, stretches the realm of possibility, and brings churning to the surface a conspiracy linking not only these current tragedies, but the buried sorrows of Eli’s past.
 
And though none of them dare say the word ‘witch,’ at least not out loud, something lurks in the woods, bent-backed and black-eyed, clawed and vengeful, looming ever closer. . .

Oooh! This one is good! Very dark and creepy indeed!

Crone has the feel of a crime novel, with one foot rooted in the crime noir tradition. In fact, it feels at times like Keith Rosson took Raymond Chandler's advice to heart, "when in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand". Though its other foot is firmly bedded in folk horror.

It's a story about a missing girl, and Hannah haunts the novel through the lasting impact she had on many of the main characters, particularly her father and her best friend. Her disappearance is definitely the inciting incident and her absence looms large over the novel. 

It's a story about a man who sees his life slip from his control, and Eli is very cleverly written to be both sympathetic and clearly a man whose misfortunes are largely of his own making. He's now in deep to some very unpleasant figures and it's so hard to see any way out for him. And those gangsters are also really well realised, coming across not as typical gangland stereotypes but as living, breathing characters with their own emotions and motivations.

It's a story about a young woman running away from a difficult life, not to find something better but simply to escape something worse, and how Avery's impulsive decisions come back to haunt her just as readily as her missing friend does.

It's a story about drugs, and the imagined drug in this novel is both utterly hideous and kind of enchanting. You can see the allure of it at the same time as the descriptions of its use are rather stomach churning.

It's a story about crime and dealing, about corruption and violence, and it feels deeply rooted in true crime stories, where young girls all too often disappear from the side of the road and are just never found again, unless some hiker comes across their remains many years later. This keeps it feeling realistic, grounded and all the more brutal for it.

It's a story about the supernatural, about the world of witchcraft and fortune telling, and spirits occupying a space so close to our own yet distinct, other. This blends so well with the crime that it ends up feeling quite natural, while never losing its horrifying aspects or its ability to shock us.

It's dark, brutal, nasty in places, yet it has a tenderness and an emotion. It's a story that cares about its characters and makes the reader care about them too, and really feel it when something awful happens to them. There's a real beauty to the darkness here.

There's also a lovely little cross-reference to Keith Rosson's last novel, Coffin Moon, that had me chortling with glee.

Crone by Keith  Rosson is out now, published by Black Crow Books.
I was gifted a review copy in exchange for an honest review and participation in this Black Crow PR blog tour.

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